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31st August, 2019By April

In episode 248 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the best ways to learn Syndication Academy 2.0 if you're new to it.

The exact question was:

Just joined Syndication Academy 2.0 and I am wondering if you can tell me the best way to go through the training? The reason I ask is I was watching a video and Brad started talking about Tier1, Tier2 and so on, and then went back and said remember when we covered this? While showing images of web rings. No, I don't remember this because I did not see that video, so there must be an order to watch the training so it makes sense. any advice is much appreciated. Thanks.

Announcement

Hernan: Alright, we're live. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Hump Day hangouts for the first day of May 2019. We have a really special guest for you guys today, which is gonna be awesome. But before we get into that, I want to go the round robin and say hi to everybody, because we don't have Adam secretary today. Would.

Bradley: You forgot the episode number? 234.

Hernan: Oh, there you go. Now, you know, that's why we get we keep them not because he's handsome. Do you know? And so let me get this in order. Okay, so I got Adam. What's up, Adam? Are you doing man?

Adam: Hey, I'm doing super well. Thanks so much for having me. But awesome book.

Bradley: But remember, that's not the same Adam that everyone's used to seeing.

Hernan: So I get Yeah, I'll get to that in a second. I get to that. What's up, Marco?

Hernan: All right, awesome. Okay, cool. So uh, so yeah, in case you guys haven't noticed yet. We have Adam from Loganix today with us. And it's really, really cool to have him on board. We have been, you know, promoting his products and whatnot with great pleasure. And it's a great pleasure to have Adam. And you know, before we go into that I wanted to give you guys a round down of announcements, which I got from our main man, Adam Moody here, which is basically if you're new to Semantic Mastery, welcome. Don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you're watching this on YouTube. If you're watching this live, thank you for being here. If not, don't forget to subscribe and whatnot. If you want to get a repeatable step by step system to rank your websites, don't forget to get the SEO Battle Plan which you can get by going to https://www.battleplan.semanticmastery.com.

You can also go to mgyb.co for all your done for you SEO Services, everything that you need over there. And if you're ready to take it up a notch, you can always join the Semantic Mastery MasterMind which is pretty awesome. We have local business owners and agency owners and that is pretty cool over there. And I just wanted to give these guys you guys a tease about this is that we're getting a facelift on our flagship GMB program. So we're going to talk a little bit about that later on as well. So with that being said, I think that I didn't miss anything that I missed anything, Bradley?

Hernan: There you go subscribe to our YouTube channel. So with that being said, we have Adam Steal from Loganix. What's up my man? It's great to have you here. We've known each other for quite a while, right?

Adam: Yeah, I think we've sort of mutually been following each other. I don't know probably since what I want to say 2012, 2013

Bradley: something like that. Yeah. Yeah, we're all guys been in the industry. Well, Semantic Mastery. We started this as a company, I think in 2013. Or maybe it might have been. Yeah, it's been a while. So it's been a while.

Hernan: So and I like that T-shirt that you haven't, man. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Bradley: You got it. You got it. Alright, so So yeah, so just as a proper introduction, Adam is the owner of Logan x Loganix not I asked him he said Potato Potato. So but you guys know I've talked about him a lot. Hands down. It's the best citation cleanup service out there. And also, he's got the monthly citation building which is really nice as well as social profiles and you different types. They're both structured and unstructured citations that get built, it's really good service. It's like the Cadillac of citation services as opposed to you know, the other services that are much more like compact cars are the way I look at it. And so typically when I have any clients that need citation cleanup, which happens fairly often, you know, that's I always go directly to him, even though there are other vendors out there that might do stuff cheaper, they don't get as good as results.

And so, you know, by the way, citations are not the only thing that he does over there. That's just typically what I talk about because that's the service that I use the most but I know that Adam has put a lot of work into recently adding a lot of additional services and more higher-end services as well. So if you guys haven't had a chance to take a look at it, I am going to drop my affiliate link semanticmastery.com/loganix and you can go see what all kinds of services he has. Great white label service guys, again, if you've got, if you've got lower end clients, you might it might not be the best time idea for you but a lot of you guys are doing well with your clients and it's a great service because it's it the reports are beautiful all of that so I can't say enough good things about Logan extra service.

Adam: Thank you, Bradley. I appreciate that. Very kind.

Bradley: So with that we also you know, I guess Adam you got anything cooking on your end like is, you know, anything new services that you want to talk about or anything that you've been in, that's been in recent development or anything industry, you know, industry news or industry related, I should say that you'd like to shine some, some of your expertise on right now or what?

Adam of Loganix

Adam: I guess it's a little bit of both. For starters, I've been heads down focusing on the link building part of our business, trying to cut the list that we the lists that we previously offered sometimes ala carte sometime previously, by domain authority. Here, we're selling a lot of stuff that was your typical guest post stuff like, you know, you go to the site and you pull up, say, the last most recent 10 posts. And it was like, super, super obvious. Oh, yeah, this is a paid guest post site, or they do paid guest posting. And so we've sort of more or less read our list of that going from, from somewhere of, I don't know, somewhere between 50 and 100,000, give or take, give or take 10,000 sites on our list to something a lot smaller, somewhere to the tune of, I don't know, five, six, maybe 700 sites total. And we just reply to very strict criteria, both quantitative so metric related stuff like they have at least 500 monthly organic visits as per Ahrefs and more qualitative stuff like pull up the last 10 posts, read every single one of them. What's the content quality, who was the author? Where's the author from? What else have they written? Is their social engagement? Are there comments? Who are they linking out to go check out the site they're linking out to etc, etc, etc. So just making sure that it's not, it's not stuff that's going to get our customers in trouble down the road. So that's my life has pretty much just been that for the last three or four months and probably for the foreseeable future.

Possible Paid GMB In The Future

So there's that and then on the news side of things, something that's kind of caught my attention lately and I'd love to get everybody's opinion on it is paid GMB in the future. Are we looking at a future where we're paying? Our everybody in GMB is paying per lead? Are we looking at a future where we're paying a monthly fee to have a GMB? What does that do to fake listings? Are they gone or do people just pay or that kind of thing? So my team and I have been discussing that at length the last few days. I think a few tweets from some folks brought that on. I think Alphabet had some pretty not so great. Well, it's still commendable gains, but people are now saying that okay, well, now they need to find a way to make more money and maps is on their hit list, supposedly, oh, and there was some sort of a survey that they had going around. I didn't personally see it. I saw screenshots up, but that they were basically asking questions about how would we pay for GMB? What we'd like to see all that kind of stuff. So it sounds like it may be happening sometime in the near future.

Bradley: It's in the pipeline. Possibly. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think it's, there's it's multifaceted why they don't want it, you know, could be because they want to generate more revenue, but I also think it's also a way to combat spam. You know that whenever the mobile first index occurred in July last year, it opened up this huge, huge, like gaping hole for spam GMBs. And you know, a lot of us have been taken advantage of that. And so I think that you know, and we knew that the days were going to be numbered, it was that it had a limited shelf life.

But we've always said, you know, it's quite a while you can, and, you know, I've been, I've assumed that one of two things were going to happen was one that it was it could go paid, which would eliminate a lot of spam listings right off the bat, because a lot of people aren't going to pay for spam listings, if they're not generating real revenue for them, or people won't attempt to try to start new ones or number two, would be to require a lot more verification, like submitting corporate documents, for example, in order to get a to register or verify or profile, that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I think that I think that they're going to do whatever they can to kill the spam side of it. And, you know, we've seen a lot of changes over the last maybe six or eight weeks now where, you know, they've done things to try to prevent that. And it seems like, you know, it's the cat and mouse game Adam that we always play, you know, it's that they, they close one loophole, and we find it somewhere else, you know, we crack the code somewhere else. And when I say we, I mean, all of us in this industry. So, you know, I don't, I feel like even if they do go that way, there's still going to be an opportunity.

I mean, for example, I've got a number of lead generation assets that are produced very, very well for me that I'd be willing to pay for. There's no question. And I think if you approach it that way, it's just a cost of doing business, you know, you work that into your overall costs for you know, and pass that off through your the cost per lead and that kind of thing, if you're going to do it that way.

Number two, I think that even if, even if they do that, they're still always going to be workarounds that we're going to be able to, you know, figure out and again, when I say we, I mean us as an industry as a whole, not just us, you know what I'm saying? So, you know, again, it's, every time there's a big change in anything that has to do with Google especially, it's like in you know, Adam, you've been around for a long time. So you get this, but this is more for our audience's benefit. A lot of people run around with their hair on fire, like, you know, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, it's not the case. It's, you know, even if it's a really big shakeup, let the dust settle, figure it out, you know, take a few deep breaths and then work through it and always find additional opportunity. At least that's my opinion. So, Marco.

Marco: I'd like to first and foremost, post to us. Google being broken, of course, I'll let me have a drink. Because every time they do something stupid, they open up another stupid door. And, you know, stupidity kinda. It's kind of like a domino. stupidity Domino, so whatever it is that they're doing somewhere along the line, guys, we're talking about if we knew that how huge the algorithm actually was, right? And everything that they were trying to control, because every time they tweaked something, something else breaks. And that opens a gaping hole. And so we're going to take advantage of that. And then there are things that they just literally cannot control. Because I've mentioned this before. It's part of how the web is built. Fundamentally, there are things that they just cannot do, no matter how much they try, when I want to call it whenever MSN, right? When they try to control it Explorer, and they try to do things their way. It didn't matter. I used to have to code for whatever version of Explorer they were doing because they were trying to go against the W3C and do things their own way. How did that work for them?

Where's Explorer now How? How's that? Where's Edge? I mean, I know its Edge, they had to get rid of the Explorer name, because it sucks. And SEOs, we found a way around everything. That's what we do. That's our job. Or, at least for me, my job is to manipulate to find ways to manipulate them because they manipulate look at it. Now that now, it's an IF. So, we don't even know if it's going to happen. But you know, it's obviously something that they're thinking about whether it happens or not. I mean, if we have to pay for it, we will just charge our clients a premium. And, yeah, they're going to piss off a whole lot of business owners. And I want to see what happens behind that. So I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Adam: Preach.

Bradley: Yeah. So and, you know, I mean, it's interesting is it, whatever happens, well, you know, we'll figure out a way to still monetize it. This is what we do. Like Marco said, so, very cool. Well, just out of curiosity, Adam about your, your link building services now that you've been focusing on building now is it Have you noticed a huge difference since you started really working on the quality of them and in the rank, you know, the, the boost that it gives to ranking with the effect that it has on rankings and even traffic for that matter? Because I know and, again, I'd like to get Marco's opinion on this. One of the things that we all know works really well is not just having links anymore. It's having links that have a true engagement to you know, so activity, relevancy, trust, and authority. That's Marco's ART. You know, and so the fact that you're going out and not just finding places to place links, but also places that have real traffic and real social engagement and that kind of stuff that has to have a significant effect and have you seen that like, you know, consistently?

Adam: You know, Yes and No. I certainly can't point to any beta or anything like that, or tests like good tests that would sort of conclusively say one thing or another, just because most of the sites that we're working on are not, not our sites, their agencies, and those agencies, this is their, these are their clients, and they could be doing a million different things at the same time. So it's very hard to, you know, to conclusively say one thing or another.

A lot of what we're doing is, is sort of based on our own theories we're trying to imagine, okay, you are a Google manual reviewer. You're performing a snip test on this site, what are you looking for? What do you not want to see? What do you want to see that kind of thing? So that's, it's very theoretical. I also think what we were doing previously using topical, like niche specific sites, but ones that certainly engaged in a lot of paid link building like Like I said, before, you pull up 10 of their recent posts, and eight of the 10 were definitely paid. And the two were actually data. They were organic, they're written in house kind of thing. I think that's still working. I think results-wise, I think that's totally still working, I'm not seeing necessarily any more results, per se, have a site up a similar traffic, but what it's forced us what all this sort of scrutiny has sort of forced upon us is, we are now working with sites that have much larger amounts of organic traffic and engagement. And while we may not be necessarily seeing better rankings per se, what we are seeing is actual referrals from these sites or get a referral showing up in Analytics. And in the case of you know, we do a little bit of link building for our own site. And in the case of us, we've seen actual money come from this and that I think that's the, it's great to increase rankings and everything, but the real sort of cherry on top or icing is, is, is when you get referrals and you get the actual sort of return on investment, if you will, that shows up in Analytics.

Bradley: Yeah, well, valid, relevant traffic, you know, from referral traffic, if it's relevant traffic that can convert, you know, and as opposed to just having links, which can help rank and obviously then when people search for specific query, have they find that, you know, that helps conversions too, but in kind of like a two-step approach versus you know, having relevant traffic coming through links from very well placed links, you know, what I'm saying? Like, I think there's a lot of benefit to that. I mean, that's the bottom line. Rankings don't mean shit. It's the revenue generated from them that we all want, you know what I'm saying? So I think that's cool. Marco, you got any comments on that before we get into questions?

Marco: No, I mean, he hit the nail on the head. Because I talked about this last week, right? That when we did the Syndication Academy updated and MGYB. Google is looking for for the finish, right? It's looking for that person that coming through that referral to finish whatever tasks were set for them to do. So they land on your website. That's one thing. But if they bounce, well, it was useless. Because that person did nothing for even though it was relevant and might have come from authority and trust nothing. What happens is that that activity is measured it and I mentioned it that you need to set right remember we talked about this you need to set the goals you need to add Analytics, Google Tag Manager that a Facebook pixel. Everything so that everything is picked up and that person is followed all the way through. And what Google wants to see is they want to see that finish. They want to see that call. They want to see that form fill. Or if you have in them download a PDF or whatever in exchange for an email. All that action is what actually sends. It finishes the signals is the cherry on top, right? Because I mean, Google, and we mentioned this with YouTube ads. Google is sending people through YouTube Ads to you to see what it is that they're going to do that doing the same thing. If you have Analytics on your website, you have Tag Manager, you're following them, you're cooking them, then, of course, they're going to be followed and everything that they do is going to be seen. That's the art of ART – activity, relevance, trust and authority activity on the link. How did they act and react when they got to the destination? Did they finish? Did they leave it halfway? Did they come back? That's why it's so important to have a cookie. Because the person may not finish the action on that day, but let's say they came back 15 days later, I still counted that cookie. Right? So that's why we want all of these things so that we sent. This is one of those times where you definitely want Google to get all of these signals. We hide a whole bunch of shit from Google. Right? Tier two and out, putting your golden frame in your tier one, branded, you want Google to get as much information as possible about what people are doing when they engage with your links off-site. And when they come on site, how they engage with, I saw on his t-shirt with content, right with links, how do they engage with it? Do they like it? You know, Google, you can bet that the following that heat map the following that person. They're seeing everything that person knows that's the most important part of the links played a vital role in this because how else is Google going to get those signals? If not through links?

Bradley: Well said my man, all right, well,

Adam: I was hoping I could just add one more thing to that. We've been doing in order to get all these new links, there's a tremendous amount of outreach that is involved. And one thing that we've seen not only improve the amount of referral traffic that we get from these placements, but also the conversions themselves is an actually on the outreach side of things. The sort of the amount of emails we get back accepting our content is when we go to these websites, I'm certainly not the one to, I didn't create this or anything. I think I heard of it at a conference. But what we do is we reach out and we do a little bit of keyword research in advance, and so will identify keywords that are relevant to the content that they're already producing that they're not presently ranking for. And we'll approach them with that information and say, Hey, you know, here's a couple of pieces we've recently written, they've received good traffic, we've noticed you don't rank for this particular keyword, we think we could write something really great. And with the sort of domain authority, etc, that you already have, I bet if we put together a piece of content for you, that is specifically optimized for those keywords that you would get more monthly organic traffic out of you know, out of the the the deal. And with that, we found a lot fewer people coming back to us and saying, okay, sure, but I want 200 bucks, which sucks. But and then, of course, you know, people, the actual people that read it are more engaged and more likely to click and more likely to do something on our on my site. So I found you're very valuable.

Bradley: You pitch it to them as it will benefit and their overall organic traffic numbers as well, potentially. Right?

Adam: Yeah. Because everybody else that's reaching out to them typically is not really thinking of how does this make them money? So I look at how are they monetizing? Is it AdSense? Is it what is how are they making their money? Can I put something together that will potentially make them money? Because then they have no reason to charge me because I'm putting something together that will potentially make them money.

Bradley: Yeah, I saw that long term money versus or recurring revenue. You know, for example, obviously, if they've got ads on their site, and they're getting ad revenue, then you know, a piece of content that ranks well and gets organic traffic consistently over time, that's going to actually produce a hell of a lot more than $200 for one guest post, you know, that nobody ever sees really, you know what I'm saying? So, yeah, I totally get that. What is it? WIIFM – what's in it for me, right? Yeah, so very cool. All right. Well, look, we've got not many Questions can compare to what we usually have them. I'm pretty surprised. But we're going to actually go through the ones that we have. And if we need to wrap it up early today, I'm cool with that too. So let me actually grab the screen and we'll get into it. Is everybody cool with that? You guys cool with getting into questions? Yep. You guys are quiet today on Hump Day Hangouts. You better post some questions or we will wrap it up early, just so you know, which would be like a first. That's okay.

I know that typically what happens if they're going to turn off recipes or athletes as they're called now, you, you usually get email notifications prior to them turning off, like if there's a reason that they're going to turn them off if they need attention, for example or something. Or if they turn them off, you typically get a series of emails saying, you know, that an app that's been turned off or disconnected, and it needs to be reconnected. So usually, there's some sort of warning signals, if they just arbitrarily turn them off. I don't know why. And that again, would be something that I mean, if I had an answer for you, Lloyd, I'd certainly give it to you, but I don't so that's something that obviously I don't work for IFTTT, I would direct them. That sort of a question to them to their support and see what their explanation is for that. So

How Do You Add Flick Or Nimbus The Same Way We Add @id Pages On Amazon S3?

Alright, the next one is Fitz. What's up Fitz? He says, Thanks for always answering questions on hump day it is appreciated when we add new sites like Flick or Nimbus or any other new sites, how do we add them? SameAs for @ID pages on Amazon s3. Okay, well, that's that's a simple one fits. You know, here's an example. I pulled this up earlier because I saw your question, I use that technical, technicalseo.com Tools Schema Markup generator, usually, when I've got to produce the code for local business, you know, structured data, and right under here is the social profiles. So for each one of these, you click now it's got a label here, but if you take a look at the actual code, there is no label. So it doesn't matter what these things say or what the icon is over here. They're just additional links. So when you and I know it's probably small on your screen, guys, but if I were to take this code, and I didn't grab all of it, but let's just take this code for him. minute, and pretend that it was already all filled out with the information that I was going to. Let's zoom in on this for a minute. Give me a minute. Okay, so all you gotta do is right here would be your same as URL, right? So loose HTTP, sameas URL, right? So all you would do is just add more of these, right? So just it's a tab, then it's, quote, your URL and quote and then a comma, and you leave the last comma off the last SameAs URL in that section of code. I'm not a coder, so I don't know what that all that shits called. I just know how to fumble my way through this stuff when needed. So my point is, you can add as many here as you want. Now, I typically recommend just adding tier one branded profiles. Citations can work too, but I usually will only add you know, top level like the citations that are really powerful.

But yeah, you can add, you can add as many of them in there as you want. Just remember the last and it just go validate it, check it in a structured data testing tool to make sure you didn't make an error somewhere. But it's really simple to do. And then the last thing is all you got to do is go update if you're talking specifically about like an HTML page, hosted an Amazon S3 Bucket, all you gotta do is just update the index dot HTML file. So go delete the original file from the bucket and then upload the new one. And that's it. That's all you should have to do. Okay.

Marco: Yeah, Bradley, I like using James Flynn's website. Okay, because he gives you the sameas code. All you have to do is enter the URL.

Bradley: Right? Well, that's what this does to. You just put the URL in here and it puts it in as the same as right here. Do you see that?
Marco: Okay. Yeah, yeah,

Bradley: all I was saying was, there's a limited number of here that they'll give you so like, even if I checked all of these, and these are the fields where you enter the URL in and it will you know, populate over here. But there's a limited number of fields. So if you have more than that, all you got to do is just copy the code, put it into a notepad file or use Notepad++ and it formats it better. And then you can actually just copy you know this and paste it in underneath and just keep adding as many as you want. It's real simple. It's not something that should be difficult. So all right. Good question Fitz.

I got one, in particular, I'd love to show you right now, but I can't because it's for a project I can't reveal at the moment. But I've got a project that I'm working on right now that I haven't done any SEO to other than it went out to a tier one branded syndication network, which is a brand new network because it's a brand new project. So and it's just one branded syndication network. And all I've done since that is set up an ad for it, and it's ranking on page one for a fairly competitive term. And so again, I see that is against my standard operating procedure is to set up ads, if you've got your targeting set correctly, you will get a bump from that. There is absolutely no question about it. So it also obviously, the video has to be optimized properly as well. So if you've got those two things, right, so you're on page correct. And then you're setting up your targeting correctly when you're driving traffic to it from YouTube ads. Those are your buying engagement signals from Google.

It will work. Again, it's it's likely that you've got something that's not completed or not optimized well and it could be the ads not optimized well or the targeting. Or it could be the video is not optimized well or could be an Uber competitive term. But that said, when it comes to using the YouTube playlist, that's essentially the YouTube silo method, right. So the idea there is to create the silo with your the term that you want to rank for if it's a broader term, then go find all the supporting keywords and then create similar videos that are supporting videos like supporting articles would be within a silo and put the place them on the playlist and there are different ways to link to do the internal linking from within the playlist to help to boost whatever video it is that you want. I would recommend that you know, don't just link from the video description up to the like the top of the silo which is the video that you the keyword that you want to rank for the most that should be the top of the silo. So video number one in the playlist, then all of this success, the subsequent videos right so

Those would be the supporting articles essentially the supporting videos are going to target longer tail keywords that would are in that same keyword theme. Right. So that same silo essentially. And then typically people would just link from the video description up to the video that they want or daisy chain them together so link from one video to the next to the next. And then at the end link back up to the top of the silo that that works too but use comment links, because comment links and by the way, you can pin those but comment links are at least they used to be and I haven't checked recently but I don't think it's changed or do follow links when their YouTube links from YouTube the YouTube comment links there do follow links so use those as well. Okay, so not only link from the video description, which is typically nofollow but not linked from the comments and then you can actually pin that link as a pin to comment so that you're it stays right below the video at all times. Okay, so check that as well as far as views comments in the like, if you're buying spanned views like, like you go to a view service, or and by comments and likes that way, Google's algorithm or YouTube, our YouTube's algorithm knows that those are fake accounts now that are doing that, because they don't have any real activity, like the algorithm can detect that stuff. Marco can go on and on and on about that, you know, to confirm what I'm saying.

So that's why I always recommend buying relevant traffic from Google directly. Because then you're likely to get real comments, real likes, perhaps real subscribe and you're getting views from real people. Google knows those are real people. Because you're buying traffic from Google, from known buckets, right? known buckets, meaning known audiences. And that's the whole point. If you're buying spammed faked engagement signals, the algorithm can detect that and it just basically disregards it's not that it harms it anymore. Like is I just think it's ignored. So you know,

As far as embeds, you can go crazy with embeds, you can go ape shit with embeds if you'd like. My assessment has always been and has been for a long time now though, if you go out and build, you know, 10,000 backlinks to a video or get 10,000 embeds for a video that has very few views, then is that natural? No, I mean, you can still brute force SEO stuff, doing that kind of stuff, especially with videos, you can still get away with that. But in my opinion, it's a lot better to do smaller embed last like 50 or 100 embeds at a time on like tier one embeds, then maybe do some tier two stuff and then send some traffic into that kind of like what we were just talking about at the beginning of this webinar, right? Send some traffic to some of the pages that the videos embed, embed it on to get views on those pages, that kind of stuff kind of activates the whole process because now it's looking as instead of just being a spam SEO tactic, it's actually getting those engagement signals and YouTube you can rank with engagement signals alone from you.

Guys, there's no question. You rank within YouTube and Google, you might need some more traditional SEO stuff as well. But engagement will help it to rank in Google, you know, Google search as well. So does anybody want to comment on that? Adam, you got any YouTube experience SEO stuff?

Adam: Which said about the ads, this is what I've done in the past. And that's definitely so my goal, especially when I don't have an audience or my client doesn't have an audience. It's a pretty quick and high-quality way of getting some engagement. It's not always good engagement, in the sense that sometimes the comments aren't exactly what I'm looking for. But engagement nonetheless. And indeed, I've seen that on multiple occasions impact my YouTube video rankings in the Google SERPs. So I certainly agree with that.

Bradley: Yeah, and so you know, again, with local guys, if you ever geographic targeting set you can go broader with your topical targeting, or your audience target. You know, I prefer audience targeting over topical targeting. But you can go broader with that as long as you have a really tight geographic area because then you're getting if you're getting clicks, engagement signals from local IPS, so your your geographic relevance is more important than topic for audience relevance, in my opinion, if you're trying to make a local video, if you're trying to rank something that's more global, or you know, national, for example, then it's much more important in my opinion, well, first of all, you still want to have local IP clicks and what I mean local is local to whatever your local area would be. If it's like if it's if you're looking to rank for a US-based term, you'd want your, your location targeting to be united states, for example. But what I'm saying is topical or audience targeting at that point would be more important in my opinion, because I've been able to achieve really good local video or local keyword rankings with videos by just using kind of broader topical or audience targeting, but setting my geographic area very tired

For just around, you know, within a 30-mile radius around a particular city, for example, that kind of stuff really helps. So again, if you're not seeing any movement at all, and you said you spent a lot of money and not seeing any bump in rankings, my guess is you're not you're targeting is incorrect. Okay, during the MasterMind, I'd be happy to analyze that for you live on our we got a webinar coming to our MasterMind webinar tomorrow. So I don't know if you are not if you are posted in the group will take a look at it for you tomorrow.

Marco: And if he's not, then it's a good time to join.

Bradley: I agree. I agree.

What Are Your Thoughts On Google Neighborhood And How It Differs From The Regular GMB?

Somebody was just talking about ranking on a more like, you know, hyper-local level, like suburb based keywords instead of, you know, citywide, maybe like neighborhood-based or, you know, very small section or boroughs. You know, like, for example, I don't know, maybe that's what they're talking about. I'm not sure as any anybody know what Google neighborhood is? Yep. What is it? Okay.

Marco: It's actually two to two things. It was started in May of last year. I think it was. So yeah, about a year ago. One is Google neighborhood, which allows you to build interestingly enough, my map, people say My Maps are dead, right, Bradley. Yeah. But here's Google last year, giving you a whole new platform where you could build a map around your neighborhood, right? This is this. This is one thing because it's my maps and yes, of course. It's totally different from the GMB three. Because GMBs use Google Maps, not My Maps. Now the other one the other project that they started with neighborly, but neighborly with you, because they actually started it in India. So the neighborly project is for people to form I don't know, relationships are on the neighborhood in India, it's not yet available everywhere. So it's just two different things and I don't seem like it could be beneficial to build you know a neighborhood map with all kinds of relevance and of course, your clients project being the most prominent in the neighborhood driving directions, K, it uses km L and you could do a KML download. If you can do a camera download, you can do an upload, and you could do a whole lot of nasty excuse me relevance in using KML, right. We do that with my maps all the time and all RYS Academy Reloaded. So yeah, it's two different and distinct things from the GMB three pack. unless they've updated it from the last time that I took it. I haven't had a look in about three or four, four months, regarding the two projects that they started. You know, I try to stay on top of my maps and everything that's going on there because they work so well.

Bradley: Very good. Thank you. I wasn't aware of that. It's not something I've even seen this Google Neighborhood. So.

How Do You Find The GMB Listing URL To Use In Authority Backlinks For Rank Boosting?

Okay, cool. So how do you find the URL for GMB listing to use authority backlinks for rank boosting? Thanks again, okay, so go into your GMB dashboard, click on the Info tab. You can even find it on the Home tab where it says view on search and view on maps. Just right click copy link address, paste it into a notepad file. Remove any of the, you know odd characters after the CID number, which is essentially the ID number for that location. So at the end of the URL, sometimes there will be like ?=en for English and in there might be some like coordinates and things like that you can eliminate all of that stuff. And then you're just left with a maps.google com URL with something like cid= or something like that. That's your URL. But you want to change the subdomain from maps dot google.com to www.google.com. Because if you take that, if you right click that link address, as I'm saying, right click on the view on maps, and then copy link address and you go to a redirect checker like redirectdetectivecom or .org I think it is or where goes or something like that. And you paste that in. It's a 302 redirect to that same URL, except instead of maps.google.com, it's www.google.com. With its but the rest of the URLs exactly the same. So my point is, you just want to swap that subdomain from maps. to www. and then that URL, right There is a straight 301 redirect. And it's not even a redirect if you take that URL and put it in a redirect checker, it's going to say 200 test, okay? Right, that's the HTML code or whatever, the header code or whatever, it's a test, okay at 200. But if you go paste that into the browser, you know, the address bar, and click Go, then it will load the map listing and then once the map listing is fully loaded, it will convert to that long, stupid, ugly URL that maps gives you. So that's why I'm saying it's interesting because it's it's essentially a redirect, but there's no redirect in the HTML header, it only converts to that really long URL once the browser is fully loaded, the maps listing, so that's the best link in my opinion to use. I've done some testing with that and I've got the best results using it.

Isn't it pretty much the same except for the miss the odd spellings of a few words? Is it Can anybody correct me on this one is there there's something significantly different between UK English and American English where the plugin wouldn't work? Not only the spelling, but I don't see how that should matter because you have to type in your titles and your descriptions anyway.

Marco: Yeah, so. I don't think that there's any difference and do get the plugin get the paid version. Yeah, the SEO ultimate plus get away from Yoast. I hate that fucking virus man.

Bradley: Yeah, that's all Bloat. Seriously, that's a great plugin guys that the get the paid version SEO ultimate plus their version two dot o was coming out soon it's been in beta testing for months now because the coding behind it is been delayed a few times but you know it's a great plugin and the paid version I don't think the free version is really supported anymore anyways, but the paid version is and it's still my SEO plugin of choice no choice.

Marco: It's two years old it probably won't work with the new newer WordPress right. We're at 5.1 point one I mean the free version. Yeah, the free version is it's not updated. So but SEO Ultimate Plus, you get a five star five site license for what? 45, 46 bucks. Totally worth it. If you're in our MasterMind you would get 10 licenses. That's another reason instead of paying 97 bucks you pay the regular 47 or whatever. And you get a 10 website license for another reason to be in our MasterMind, Jeff he's a buddy man. Yeah.

Bradley: So yeah, I don't think it would make any difference as far as UK English versus US English. I can't imagine it would we got a lot of members that are from the UK that are using it, and I haven't heard that before. So but again, they're probably using the paid version.

How Long Does It Take For The RYS Stacks To Start Showing Its Ranking Power?

All right, Gergely. I guess it says, Hey, guys, thanks for these webinars. Usually how many does is it take days does it take for an ROI stacks to show that start to show their power? That varies. It does take a while it does. There's no question. It's not something that happens overnight. But the boost that you can get from it can be quite significant and they can and it can last for years. I just demonstrated that again last week when Marco and I did the MGYB and Syndication Academy update webinar, I was talking about that. I can demonstrate it again. But my point is those the effect from that will last for a long, long time. How long does it take for it to show any boost? That really depends, and I noticed sometimes it takes a lot longer than others. Marco can, you can comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, sure. And I'm gonna go totally with you. It depends. It depends on the competition. It depends on your keyword targets. It depends on how well your website structure set up. It depends. If you're aiming it at GMB. Right. And if you're trying to pop it into the three pack, it depends on how much power you're putting behind it. Are you doing press releases? Are you doing link building? Are you doing link building to your drive stack and press releases? Are you doing tiered link building? This whole matters because that's the amount of power that you can push. If you read the done for you User's Guide, it recommends waiting 21 days, because that's when you clear the Google dance. And you know that some people will say that there's no such thing as a good Google that they call it a sandbox, call it whatever you want. It takes 21 days, from the moment you start for your project to settle into where Google thinks it could be. So on the 22nd, day, you go and you take a look, whatever Rank Tracker you're using, I like to use a Search Console and Analytics to see what kind of bump I'm getting to see if anything moved up. Plus, some local rank trackers if it's local, or some other type of rank trackers. Once you have the data that you need data. You can't go on suppositions you can't go on. What if you can't go on how long will it you have to have the data once you have the data and you see that you have stuff on the second page that you can push up there, you can hit it with presses, you can hit it with a PR bomb, you can hit it with, you can do a MyMap and beds, and then link built to the mind map in bed. There are tons of things that you can do. That's why you get the User's Guide. And if you didn't get the user's guide, you should have gotten a link in your email by the way to download it. Then what you need to do is contact support at mgyb.co, and ask for you done for you User's Guide because that tells you what to do.

Bradley: There you go. And again, this will be demonstrated on the webinar last week that I was talking about guys, which is nuts. This is you know, this is all done from a drive stack. That's the Google site within the drive stack. Okay, this is the WordPress doc this was done. Take a look at the date on this. I know it's probably small. I'll zoom in on just one of them, guys.

Look at the date on that May 16, 2015. So that was almost four years ago. And if you take a look at this guys, this was just one of them and this was four years ago when I didn't even know like I just learned how to build a Dr. stack that day. And I didn't even have instructions for Marco, he just told me about the concept. And it was on a Saturday and I literally took, I stopped doing what I was doing that day, and spent about five hours building my first drive stack, without even any instruction, just based upon that little bit of information marker told me and this if you take a look at this, guys, I mean, again, ranking number one for four years. And the WordPress com site, it's pushed my main site up and put me into, you know, I've got somewhat of I've got a local IP, so I'm showing a knowledge panel as well. But for various keywords or variations of the keywords, ranked for many of these properties, again, with doing absolutely no backlink building, and just actually doing the drive stack stuff, right. So again, number one for all our ranking all the other Virginia SEO agencies with a shitty Google site that has shitty spun content, like literally that was a spun article from a content farm and it's got nothing but a bunch of drive.

That's a broken Google Plus embed. Google Plus is dead. And like it's just absolutely been dominating for four freakin years now. And what's interesting is this wordpress.com site, free WordPress. com site, if you guys go view page source on this, the only content on this page and the post body of this page is this right here. The rest of that is just embedded iframe, they're just embedded drive stack files. There's absolutely no written content on this page, guys, except for that one line of text right there. And it's been ranking number one, or in this case, that's what number three for years and there's no bad go check the backlink profile on this stuff. It's insane. And so again, like you know, it took probably, I don't know, seven or eight weeks before I like I remember because I had been checking on it for several weeks. I was checking on it to see if if anything had happened from the stack that I built was the very first one that I ever done, and I don't build them now. Anyways, we got somebody that and for us, right? You guys do too. You can, you can hire us to do it.

But I looked at for four weeks, I kind of track this. And then I gave up on it because I didn't see anything from it. And then one day somebody had said something I said, Oh, yeah, let me go check on that. And it had been several weeks, and I went and checked on it. It was boom, number one. And it's been number one ever since. And it's just been crazy. So it does, it does work. And it's not, that's not the only example. That's just the one that I don't mind showing. You don't I mean, so, be patient. Also, some of the other things you can do is build links to it. That's you know, we've got a link building service specifically designed for that at MGYB. So you know, you can hit it with kitchen sink spam, and it will take it like a champ.

What's The Use Of @ID Pages?

Alright, next is what's the point of an ad ID page. Did you make any tests with that Id pages if they make a difference? Yeah, we wouldn't have taught it if we didn't make tests if we didn't test it first. So we are you know, everything that we do we've tested and it has to do with. The reason it works so well is iframe stalking, which is taught in RYS Academy, primarily. But the @ID page principal or the method has been taught in pretty much all of our different paid courses. And that just works really, really well because of iframe stalking. Okay. And it works, it does make a difference because you can use the @ID page or any sort of stacked iframe page doesn't have to be an @ID page. We just do that, because that's very specific to local guys. But again, you can create tier one properties that are using a Google site, for example, with a bunch of iframe stuff that you do, and it's not going to get into specifics here. But then that becomes a link building target. Right, that becomes a target that can boost all of the assets. So yes, it does absolutely help if you're in any one of our paid training, and you'll know how to build them. If you're in the MasterMind, we can get into that much deeper if you'd like. You know, we can talk about why and how and I can show you other examples.

Okay, Dan says I will have to go through. So he's the one asking about the YouTube ads and a playlist and all that. He says I have to go through with a fine tooth comb. Because what you mentioned, I've done with the exception of comment links. Thanks for the input. Yeah, no problem.

Also, Dan, think about this. If you have other profiles available, like from syndication networks, for example, other Google profiles that have YouTube accounts, you can go in and actually take that video and add that video that you want to rank for and other playlists. So in other Google profiles, create a playlist, a keyword optimized playlist for the keyword that you want to rank for, and then add the video that you're trying to rank into that playlist in other Google accounts, right? like it, comment it from those other Google accounts, as long as you're not all logged in from the same IP. So for example, and even if you are, it's okay, but not what I'm saying is don't, don't just go clear your cache and cookies and log into another Google account. That doesn't work. What I'm saying is if you're using something like browser or ghosts browser or something like that

Where your browsing sessions remain intact for each profile, you can even use the same IP, that's fine because all of those different profiles are going to be acting as if they're their own. You know, their own profile, there have their own browsing histories and things like that. And so you can use those to kind of help give it a boost. I had it I ran a test for one of the videos that I had done some standard SEO stuff like it went through my syndication networks. And I had set up a video ad for a YouTube ad for it to start getting some engagement but it was bouncing on page two like it was hovering on page two. And then all I did was I took five different browser to profiles that I had that have a significant history built for them. And I went in watch the video, I commented with one profile I liked it with another profile then with the fifth but I did several things but it with the fifth profile. Again, they were more aged Google accounts but that have had a

You know, significant browsing history and activity that have accrued within those profiles for, you know, over the last couple of years, really. But the last thing I did was I created a playlist keyword optimized playlist with the lat the fifth profile, added that video, then I commented on it with the playlist URL is the comment. And, and like, within, I'm not kidding, within 30 seconds, it jumped to page one, and it's been on page one ever since. So that kind of stuff really does help if you can get the video added to other people's playlist, essentially, even if you're doing it yourself. That will help to Okay.

What Makes Google Decide Which Brand Should Rank First When Both Of Them Have The Same Name?

So in other words, if it's Joe's plumbing, com, we'll just use that as an example is the website and the name of the company is Joe's plumbing. Then people doing searches for Joe's plumbing. I know you're saying you've got a competitor with the exact same name, but you've got a unique URL, right? So if you've got Joe's plumbing.net and the other guys Joe's plumbing com then I would do like Joe's plumbing.net searches like a search for that domain name and Google and then click through

you know, you could do a navigational searches, which would be brand plus services like so different types of services, service keywords, or product keywords, depending on what type of business you're trying to promote. I'm looking for the contact information so Joe's plumbing contact, or Joe Joe's plumbing phone number, like seriously that type of a search query Joe's plumbing, plus phone number, like you put that in and if it pops up with the right phone number on the right list and click through those kinds of things. Now not it's not something that you can do from the same IP that it's going to have an effect

But if you can kind of crowdsource that out, there are ways to do that right micro-task worker, for example, those type of navigational queries will help to push it out something that you have to maintain though. So you know, until once you take over that position or get your knowledge panel to appear as opposed to the competitors, a lot of times organic activity will take over anyways and will help it to maintain that. But you can force that issue. You can also do it with ads. Again, I can't talk about how to do that here but you actually can do part of that using Google ads or even Facebook ads. So again, it's all about that activity and engagement signals on the brand that you want to promote and that's going to help to give it that edge. I mean, you can do some other standard SEO stuff but I found that you know, we've been a Marco and I have both done tests where we've been able to manipulate knowledge panel or in things like auto suggest, by you know, specific engagement signals. Marco, you want to comment that all that?

Marco: No, that handled it perfectly.

Adam: Yeah, that's been my experience as well. Using stuff like, micro workers is one of my favorites but there's a number of other ones that are Yeah, good. Hang on where you live?

Bradley: Well, yeah, that's an old process. We talked about Ivan boot Amir taught me that years and years I think it was 2011 might have been 2012. But that's where he like introduced that, that concept and micro-task workers and I mean, it's it really that's what I call click-through spam, but so CT spam, but it works really well. Again, you have to engineer it correctly, but if you do it right, then you can significantly change, like the positioning of a website and you can also change like auto-suggest, you know, suggested search queries and all kinds of stuff doing that.

Adam: Yeah, it's good for like, reputation management's where, you know, you know, brand name, spam comes up and you want to put something above it in an auto-suggest have used it for that. But yeah, like you said, it's the kind of thing you have to maintain when you start doing it for a period of time. In my experience, it often reverts to what it was. Yep, not done anything else.

Bradley: Alright guys, we actually have to wrap it up. Sorry. We're at the five o'clock mark and I have to run but I appreciate all the questions they did come in. We were worried that it was going to be a slow day today, but it wasn't. So thanks, everybody, and Adam. Hey, man, thanks for hanging out with us today.

Adam: Da totally My pleasure. I'm really really grateful for you having me it's been a little bit of fun.

21st January, 2019By April

In episode 210 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked if he should start with Semantic Mastery’s Syndication Academy or The Battleplan to build his business.

The exact question was:

Hey guys, it has been a long time since I've been on a humpday hangout. I got caught up on the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny objects syndrome. I didn't fully understand how POWERFUL digital marketing is and what it can for your business.

You would think that's a no-brainer for an IT guy….

Anyway, I'm back for real, and I'm ready to learn this stuff. I just downloaded the battleplan. I'd love to get involved in the mastermind but I'm not able to afford it at this time. The Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner-up. Can I start there to get things going, or just start with the battle plan? Thanks guys, and congrats on your 4 year anniversary!

30th July, 2018By April

Support question from K. Renee Ward
Is syndication still relevant? I have your course from 2015. There have been many SEO changes since then. 7-8 this year and I was wondering if its worth the trouble to syndicate. Also, are there any negative repercussions? Since Google is so picky nowadays.

hi. I have a question regarding the battleplan. How is this different than the IFTTT academy, RYS or the mastermind? Does it add something new or it is a blueprint that incorporates info from all of them? thank you.

Announcement

Bradley: Come on.

Adam: All right, we are live. Everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 125. Today is the 29th of March, 2017 and we've got almost the full group here, so we'll go round and do what we do. I'll start off with Bradley today. How's it going man?

Bradley: Hey man. Glad to be here. Got a lot of really good questions on the page already, so looking forward to it.

Adam: Cool deal. Marco, how you doing?

Marco: Hey man, good to be here. I was just, it just hit me when you said 125, we actually have 125 hours of free stuff on our YouTube channel. All people have to do is go to our YouTube channel, use the channel search for anything that they're looking for and we probably already answered the question. How good is that?

Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bradley: That's 125 hours of just Hump Day Hangout content, because there's a lot of hours of other content as well.

Hernan: I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, 125, it's a great number. Also I'm excited because we've had a great testimonial early so it's good to see that all of these hours we're pumping out and we're dedicating a bunch of work to [inaudible 00:01:26], but it's actually getting great results this year. I'm really excited to see those kinds of things.

Adam: Why don't you tell people. We said we're not going to tell by name, but why don't you tell everybody a little bit, like the outline of what we just found out this morning.

Hernan: Yeah sure. We got a message from one of our students telling us an actual business income, like a real screenshot. It's a bank statement actually about making one year of SEO. I think it adds up to 100 …

Bradley: Just under 140K.

Hernan: Yeah. Just under 140K for the last year. That's pretty amazing. He's saying well, of course he's taking action, he's taking massive action. He's moving forward, closing clients, et cetera, et cetera, so I think that's amazing. Also it's kind of what we're trying to do here. It's funny because you're out there trying to put a lot of content, put eh best that you can do and trying to actually impact lives and change lives. That's something that I really like seeing.

Bradley: It's great to see 2015 about 12K, 2016 about 140K. He says, “I love you guys. It's from SEO work.” That's amazing.

Marco: No, but the interesting thing is this isn't an agency. This isn't an SEO guy doing SEO for somebody else. This is a guy who took our stuff and applied it to his own business and is making this kind of money. He's in a major metropolitan area, but he applied it to his business, grew his business. This is amazing to me. This is an amazing …

I see this and the possibilities for you guys, for everyone listening, they're endless because we just keep finding new ways to make ranking easier. They tell you it's harder. Google tells you so much shit and you guys believe it. I'm like please, please, don't make that your mantra, Google said so. If they said so, go and do the opposite.

Bradley: The opposite, yeah. See what happens.

Adam: That's right. For the record I just want to say that this is one of our Mastermind members, but if you're listening and you're somewhat newer to the Semantic Mastery or you're just coming across us, please check out the Syndication Academy. That's a great place to get started, combined with the Hump Day Hangouts. I'll pop the link on the page in a minute.

Excuse me, a quick review of the last week. We did want to say that the Live Rank Sniper replay is still available. That was the webinar with Peter Drew. A lot of people really into that, popped it into their toolbox and having some cool results so by all means, go check out the replay. Again, that's just a free replay. We're going to put that on there, some really good information.

Bradley: A couple things.

Adam: Yeah, go ahead.

Bradley: You mind if I jump in on that for a minute Adam?

Adam: No, go ahead.

Bradley: One, you mentioned Syndication Academy. That's really simple guys, for those of you that are new so you don't have to go searching for it, it's Syndication.Academy. Very, very simple. Okay, as far as Live Rank Sniper, awesome product. It really is. It's so simple to use and it's great for identifying keywords that you can rank for very easily.

I like it a lot. I've been using it a lot. I added several cases studies as a bonus for anybody that had purchased. That case study is pretty much done. I've got one more video to add still to the bonus site guys. If you haven't checked the bonus site for a couple days, go back and check it again because I added another training or a another case study update yesterday. Anyways, I've got one more to do which is going to be like I'm going to be talking about the strategy and what's next after those case study results came back from using Live Rank Sniper.

I'm just going to give you a little tease right now because what I'm doing with those case studies is I'm extending them onto another product that we're going to be holding a webinar for in about two weeks that I'm seeing. Essentially what I did was I took Live Rank Sniper, the case study results or whatever Live Rank Sniper showed me as the keywords that I could rank for and then I plugged them into another software, and other YouTube tool. We're going to be again, introducing that to you guys in about two weeks.

I'm seeing some incredibly good results with it right now, so the case studies from Live Rank Sniper are going to carry on into this next tool that we're going to be showcasing and I'm going to show you what I've done with the Live Rank Sniper keywords that I found. Then using the new tool and the results that I've been able to get and it's really, really powerful. I'm actually pretty excited. I've only got one out of five of those case studies completed right now, so I've got four more to do. If the other four perform like this first one did, then we're really onto something. We'll be announcing a little bit more about that next week guys.

Just know that there's something that's coming very, very soon. If you don't have Live Rank Sniper and you don't know what I'm talking about with the case studies, well, go pick it up because it's inexpensive and you can get access to the case studies just by purchasing it. There's a whole bunch of unannounced bonuses in that bonus site that we're not even going to tell you about, but if you purchase you'll be pleasantly surprised. Okay? Okay Adam, carry on. Sorry.

Marco: Why are we always giving so much stuff away?

Bradley: I know. I know.

Adam: You get one and you get one and you get one. All right, that's about it but we do want to say we sent out some emails about the RYS Stack Webinar that's happening tomorrow. I'll put the link on the page. This is going to be a really cool and shorter webinar where we're going to go over some information about RYS stacks. Where you can use them, when you can use them, why you should be using them. Trust me, this is important.

Then on top of that how you can do this through search base and get the done for you option. If you haven't heard of RYS Academy or you aren't sure what this is, well, I don't know, do you guys want to go over that? Just a quick elevator pitch on why people should be aware of the done for you services for RYS?

Bradley: Yeah, because it's a huge time saver. They're done to our specifications and the way that we build them so it eliminates so much additional work. Look, if you want to learn how to build your own stacks, especially if you're running … Well, you know what? I used to say if you were running an agency that you should hire your own team members and then put them through the training courses so that they can produce them for you. To be honest with you, there's a lot of learning curve and a lot of time that goes into first of all hiring and firing, hiring and training somebody.

If you use out Outsource Kingpin product it will streamline that quite a bit. There's still a lot of time involved in actually getting them up to speed and trained well and then managing them and all that kind of stuff. We've already got all that stuff done. The heavy lifting is done for you guys. If you order through us it's going to be done. You don't have to worry about training or hiring or monitoring and managing and all of that. It just gets done. We're going to be showcasing how, what our RYS stacks or drive stacks are, why they're so effective and how to order them through Serp Space. Marco you want to comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah. It took me a month to train Jason, to get Jason up to speed on building these. Unless you want to spend the time to learn RYS and then an extra month to train the VA who might or might not work out, because you have to pick out the right VAs, right? If you don't have the course that teaches you how, it's like hit or miss. We have a way to identify the best of the best and then get those into the training area so that we finish with the very best. Unless you have all that, we've done it for you. That's a very big deal as far as I'm concerned.

We're going to give away part of why it works tomorrow. That flows right into the one that I'm doing on Monday which is I'm going into the overall reason of IFTTT or excuse me, Syndication Academy and RYS Academy and why both should be part of the toolbox. It can be RYS Academy or done for you RYS, either one. It should be part of every build. We'll follow that up tomorrow. We'll follow that up on Monday. I want to get into questions.

Adam: Awesome. All right, one just quick one that I saw this week, I don't know if you guys noticed, but it looks like on May 2nd YouTube's ditching annotations, so anybody who's using annotations out there, you've got till May 2nd to edit or delete them and then they way they are is the way they are. If you use those and you want to change them or update now is the time to do it.

Hernan: Yup, they're moving into the mobile friendly version of the annotations, the end of the year annotations and then you can use cards. That's clearly a move into more mobile optimized version of YouTube.

Adam: Yup. Got you.

Bradley: Scott mentioned that he had not found the Live Rank Bonus case study. Scott, if you purchased through us you should have been added to the bonus site already. Check your spam folder. If perhaps you purchased it before we had the automation setup, just contact us at [email protected] and provide the PayPal transaction ID so that we can verify the purchase and then we'll add you to the membership site, the bonus site manually, okay? Anybody having any issues with that just contact us at [email protected] All right?

Adam: Okay cool. Can we get into questions now?

Marco: Let's do it.

Bradley: Let's do it. I'm going to grab the screen. My audio dropped for a minute. Bear with me.

Adam: We'll just chat while Bradley's not here.

Hernan: We can talk about him because that's a good connection and he'll come back. HeyBradley: Here we go.

Bradley: Hey, shh, here he comes. Here he comes. Stop talking about him. All right, you guys can see my screen now?

First and foremost look at what the content was on that site originally from the domain that you're picking up and make sure it's relevant. If it's relevant to the niche that you're going to be placing the link on that rebuilt domain pointing to your money site you want to make sure that it's a relevant, that it's topically relevant first and foremost. That's the most important thing to look at.

The second most important thing, very next thing that you do is go look at the backlink profile and make sure that they're clean backlinks. No spammy shit. You want to look at, one thing I like to do with Majestic is look at the map. When you look at the backlinks the map, it will show you where backlinks are coming from. Typically if it's got backlinks coming from Russia or China or Korea a lot of the times I won't even pick those domains up because it means it's been spammed for the most part. The vast majority of the time it means it's been spammed.

You also just want to scroll through and take a look at the backlinks. Guys, I'll pick up expired domains. I don't do it near as much as I used to, but I will pick up expired domains that only have one backlink because that's all that matters to me. What I like to do, obviously the more referring domains it has the better. As far as, and let me try to explain this a little bit better.

It used to be the more referring domains the better, but that's not the case anymore because what you're looking for is quality. It's not quantity, it's quality, right? What I worry about with buying domains with only a couple of backlinks pointed to them or a couple of referring domains, it could have more than just handful of backlinks, but if they're only coming from a couple of domains, is what happens if the webmaster of the site that's linking to that domain finds out that the domain has been expired or that the content has changed or whatever and they can go in and remove that backlink and now especially if you've got a domain that has only got one or two referring domains pointed to it, then you've just lost whatever SEO value that it really had, right?

What I do is I go back and look at the way back machine for the linking domain. In other words, the domain that's linking to the domain that I'm about to pick up or purchase, I'll look at that backlink and the history of how long that backlink has been there. If it's been there for let's say five years or two years or whatever, if it's been there for any length of time then I'll suspect that it will likely stay there. It's unlikely that that backlink is going to be removed.

I just want to make sure that the linking domain has some history for how, like that backlink has been there for some period of time. Depending on how desperate I am for expired domains for that particular niche will determine how far back I'll go to cross that threshold to where it will make it worthy of my purchase or let's say I abandon it because the backlink's too new. You know what I mean? The other part of that is it used to be also that you would look at the backlink profile and you would worry about backlinks dropping from the domain if you picked up an expired domain and then rebuilt the site, which is how we used to it, right?

We used to do that private blog networking sites or PBN sites, right? We would go out, buy expired domains because of their metrics, strip the … We would install a new WordPress site, install new content. A lot of the times it wouldn't even be in the same niche. Well then that's very, very likely that other linking domains that are pointing to it are going to remove the backlink if the webmaster goes and views that link and takes a look at the destination site which ends up being the domain that you rebuilt.

It's got some other content on it, it's not in the same niche or whatever, they're going to remove that link. When you're building expired domains, when you're rebuilding expired domains with the content that was on them when they expired then even if a webmaster were to look, they're going to see the same site that they linked to originally anyways. Does that make sense?

My point is when it comes to buying what I call PLN or private link network sites instead of private blog network sites or private link network sites because they're not really blogs, they're not WordPress, right? They're HTML sites. As I look for relevancy number one, number two, a clean backlink profile and if it meets those two criteria then I'll research the backlinks that are pointed to it to see what their age is on that. If they've got any length of time or history then I'll go ahead and pick up that domain. It can be used for money site or tier one properties.

The cleaner, the more relevant, the closer you can get to your money site or even point directly to your money site. If there's any question or if it's not necessarily in the same niche, if it doesn't cover the same topic, it's a little bit broader or it's like a tangent market or something like that then I would use it as a tier one, a link to tier one properties instead. You guys have a comment on that?

Marco: If I could just add something. I have two, or three they turn in to be three things. We now have Adela and a Dr. Gary who are really good at spotting the domains that we need and they're niche-relevant. They add the relevance that we want. We don't go through that process any longer unless we have to or unless we want to.

The second thing is if you don't do your due diligence with these domains you're going to tank your rankings. If you point it at your money site and you didn't do it right, you're going to see it go in the shitter. It's almost overnight. You have to make sure that you know what you're doing. If you don't and you still pick one up, go to tier one. Go where you at least have a layer of protection until you actually know what you're doing because you learn over time. You learn to spot them and you learn to spot what's actually spam and what isn't.

Once you're that good, then you can say okay, I'm going to pick this one up and I'm going to point it at the money site and you're going to see wonderful results. Once you're experienced. If you're not, don't do it. Don't do it unless you want to see your site go in the dumper, then by all means go ahead.

Yeah Ivan, to be clear, yes it would help to put, for your branded properties especially, like you said, to treat your branded properties like money sites. Guys, you should be doing that anyways. Try to flesh out your branded properties as much as possible and if you can add markup then do it. Now listen, let's be real clear. I want to make it clear to you guys I don't do that on all the properties that I set up because a lot of the networks that I set up don't require that. They're used for syndication or SEO purposes only, whatever.

For client sites, and I'll be honest with you, a lot of my lead gen sites I don't even have that setup because it's just so time consuming. I probably should have a VA that does it for me, but I don't. I only do it for client sites really and a few of my lead gen sites. I don't do it on all of them. Absolutely you can.

Now here's the thing though, a lot of those are going to strip any sort of structured data out anyways. That's the problem is trying to add structured data to these because it ends up getting stripped out by the editor, right? By the platform itself. That's really where it's tricky. Now if you can, like for example if you can go in and add like where you would add analytics code for example in the header and things like that, if you can go in and edit those fields within the platform, then yeah, you can add JSON-LD code. Whether it validates or not you'd have to check, okay?

Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I've been able to do in the past, it's been a while since I've done it so I can't even remember which platform it was on, but not using JSON-LD, but you had to use micro-data. Which micro-data is like, it's structured data but in HTML format so you can markup elements within an editor, but like I said, a lot of the times it depends on the platform. I can't remember which ones they were off the top of my head, but it will strip it right out.

Don't waste your time without checking first. Go test a few of the sites and see unless Marco or Hernan, if you guys know the ones off the top of your head that will accept that, I don't know them off the top of my head.

Marco: No, not off the top of my head. The ones that I do know are not ones that I care to talk about at this point.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: Right. For example if I may Marco, Blogger, I know that it will accept JSON-LD, JavaScript, pretty much everything that you throw at it on HTML because you can actually edit the template.

Bradley: The theme.

Hernan: You know? Yeah, the theme. You can edit the template, you can edit the theme. Weebly will do it too in case you are syndicated to Weebly. There's a bunch of those that they will accept HTML. Blogger for sure, Weebly pretty much. I think Tumblr as well, but we have abused Tumbler and for that reason it's not that permissive anymore. We are 100%, we are 100% responsible about that, so sorry about that guys.

Yeah, basically those three I think will accept HTML. In any case on the update webinars we are always looking for new platforms and what's good about it is that we will uncover either Web 2.0 or live stream sites or Semantic Hubs as we call them where you can actually add schema or you can actually embed a bunch of things like my maps. Well, a bunch of things, so stay tuned of that and go through the past trainings, the past update webinars because there's a ton of gold in them and there's a ton of properties that will actually accept that if you need a push or if you need to rank those properties on page one as well.

Bradley: Yeah. I'm going to name one here guys, and before Marco and the crew all get mad at me, I'm now going to name … You have to be in Syndication Academy to get the full training on this. I'm just going to make a mention of one that's really, really powerful that you can do all kinds of nasty stuff with Ivan. Since you're on Syndication Academy you can find it. It was in the update webinar from like I don't know, three or four months ago.

It's called Pearl Trees. That's a great tier one property because you can do all kinds of nasty stuff in there. Go back and watch that webinar. It's one of the Semantic Hub or additional properties inside of the update webinar from I want to say three or four months ago. Just go back and take a look. You'll see what I'm talking about. There's some real ninja stuff you can do with schema markup and all kinds of stuff with the Pearl Trees site. Okay. Guys, I didn't just give away too much, did I? I tried to tread lightly.

Hernan: I know that you feel like giving more, but we're fine. That's a nugget.

Using Google's Trust Indicator To The Landing Pages Of Adwords Campaigns

Yeah okay, I see what you're saying. I have not tested that, but you're talking about taking your landing page URL and shortening it with a GOO.GL short link and then using that as your landing page URL in AdWords. Now I haven't tested that. My initial thoughts or assumptions would be that it wouldn't have an effect on quality score only because what I have seen through my own testing for the last year with AdWords stuff is that quality score is a function of two things really.

Number one, your bid, your max bid is one and then the other thing which has the most effect on quality score is going to be your click through rate of the ad itself. Those are the things. Now your landing page experience, like honestly, I have played with multiple versions of landing pages trying to affect the quality score from that. It has a very minimal effect on quality scores. As long as your landing page has basically some basic or some basic elements to it, that's all that's required.

Then obviously you want to have the keyword, especially in the SEO title or whatever. Even though it's in AdWords you still want the meta-title of the page. That's really it. As far as everything else, the bid, the max bid amount, that's going to have an effect on quality score to a degree, but the vast majority of the quality score metric is calculated by click through rate.

That's going to be determined by always rewriting, always split testing ads and trying to improve your click through rate. Just as a side note, there's a lot of industries, guys, that you'll get into, and I know because as my experience continues to grow in AdWords I see it now more and more. At first I didn't understand why sometimes I would set up ads in one campaign and they would have quality scores of three and four and then I would set up the same type of ads with the same type of landing page as far as the elements, but for different keywords, so in a different industry, and I would start off with quality scores of five or even seven.

Sometimes within a day or two they'd go up to eight or nine or even quality scores of 10. I would wonder why is that. That's when I started really playing around with different things that I would try to manipulate quality score with and your max cost per click bid is one. Another one that Marco gave me a hint at, I wasn't able to prove it, was increasing your budget, your daily budget as well.

I wasn't able to prove that and it's probably because I didn't go extreme enough, so we won't talk about that much. I tried playing with landing pages as well and I couldn't manipulate quality score more than just like a point from landing pages. Once I started really honing in click through rates which is always … The strategy for that is just constantly always be split testing your ads and trying to achieve the highest click through rate.

Run two ads concurrently. Split test your ads, so run two concurrently and let it run until you've generated either a certain number of clicks or you've allowed them to test against each other for a certain amount of time. It's usually a function of volume of clicks, right? Let's say I want to allow 30 clicks to this ad and I'm going to go back and take a look and see which ones have the higher click through rate. Then you keep the one with the higher click through rate and you pause or eliminate the one that has the lower click through rate.

Now you write a new ad to split test against your control, right? The one that just performed better. You constantly refine until you get your click through rate up. Here's the thing, what I was saying just a moment ago about starting off with different ad groups and seeing how some would have low quality scores right off the bat and other ones would have higher, and that's based on when you start a new campaign, guys, AdWords will give you a mean or a baseline, a quality score based upon the industry average or the average for, the quality score average for that industry.

If you're in a space where you're running AdWords campaigns where there's a lot of shitty advertisers, in other words advertisers that don't know what they're doing and aren't optimizing their campaigns, your campaign's going to start off with a low quality score and that's only because that's like the mean or the median in the industry of the industry average, if that makes sense.

The only way to get your click through rate, or excuse me, your quality score up is to start improving your click through rate to get well above and beyond what the industry average is. Once you do that, and I don't know, that number various depending on every industry. For example if I can get a click through rate up to say like 30% in the tree service industry, my quality scores are going to be eight to 10 hands down every time.

If I keep my click through rate down around the 10 to 15%, which I believe is pretty standard for the industry, then my quality scores are going to be, they're going to range between five and seven. Once you get to seven and eight, eight and above, you really get much lower costs and you get the higher quality, the higher ad rank and all of that. I know that was kind of a long winded answer, but I wanted to explain. I haven't tested using the GO, excuse me, the Google short link as the landing page URL.

I don't think it would have an effect, but I haven't tested it. I just wanted to explain really what the quality score, the biggest influence on quality score is going to be click through rate.

Marco: All right, so can I just mention something that I picked up from what you just said and from what he's trying to say?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: If click through rate is a factor for quality score and you have a Google URL showing, that's…

Bradley: [inaudible 00:30:16] more clicks, is that what you're going to say?

Bradley: That's a really great idea and that's something that I wasn't even considering when I was answering this, but that's a good point Paul, if you have that GOO.GL short link it's going to be basically a Google URL. That might be deemed more trustworthy by the searcher or the visitor, right? It might end up generating a higher click through rate like Marco just said.

Test it, Paul. Test it and let me know. In fact I might even test that on a couple campaigns just to see. In which case I'll, I don't know where I'll share it. Ask me again at a later date, Paul. I just want to give a quick recommendation. This is not an affiliate link guys, but there is, this is a really cool site. I think it's, what's it say? Ten scores.

Okay, tenscores.com. Check this out. They've got this big pop-up here. Let me close this. I forget how to close this damn thing. Right there. Okay, so Ten Scores. This is a great service. It's like really cheap. It's like 25 bucks for 5,000 keywords or something like that. It's ridiculous. You can view plans and pricing here. Fifty thousand active keywords, up to five AdWords accounts fro $25 a month.

Guys, this is really cheap. Most of the AdWords optimization platforms are really expensive. This one is dirt cheap. I really like it because this is really what turned me on to … I finally started believing that click through rate was the biggest influencer of quality score once I started following the Ten Score blog. Then I ended up purchasing it and I've started using it for some of the AdWords accounts that I manage.

I started seeing actual, real results by just manipulating click through rate. I saw real improvements in quality score just by doing what this blog tells me to do and then I started using the service on some of my accounts. It absolutely is true. For a while there I just didn't believe that click through rate was the biggest influencer on quality score until like I said, and by the way there's a great blog on this site too. Read our blog. Right there.

The guy, his name's Christian I think, I guess the guy that owns this or whatever. It's a great blog. He's got some awesome, awesome articles in here about how to improve AdWords campaigns. I highly recommend that you guys, even if you don't purchase the product or whatever or subscribe to it just go through and start paying attention to these blog posts. Subscribe to the blog because he really has got some great stuff. Okay?

Marco: That's information from a paid webinar. I'm not sharing it here.

Bradley: Okay. There you go. Let's see. “Also what's your take on using exact geolocation keyword phrases that would otherwise cause over-optimization with regular SEOs?” Okay, same thing. Paul, we're going to have another webinar on Monday, right? Is that right?

Marco: Yes we are, but it doesn't involve IFrames. It's a followup.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: He can ask questions at the end of the webinar. I might answer it.

Previous Business Shows Up When You Google Your Client’s New Business Address

Let's see, oh, “I just got a new client, just got a new location. Okay, client just got a new location. Wants me to build citations but when I Google the address the old business that occupied the spot shows up.” Okay, so what you're saying is there's still citations out there. Okay, I see what you're saying, James. All right, I'm going to share with you a link. It's semanticmastery.com/loganix. In fact let's just type it out.

This, guys, this is the service I use for any sort of … Any time I got a citation or NAP issues I always go to these guys for this because they hands down, if it's a US business it's the best service for this. It's the citation cleanup service. If you go to semanticmastery.com/loganix, L-O-G-A-N-I-X. It will take you over here and go to the services and it's the citation cleanup service right here.

It's 500 bucks for it, but it's totally worth it guys because they will do, at least in the US market they do hands down the best job I've ever come across and I've had to do this many, many times over my career. I've hired virtual assistants and trained them how to do this manually. None of it has ever been as good as what these guys do. They do it very efficiently.

Again, I highly recommend that you check out Loganix. Again, it's 500 bucks, but if you are dealing, when you're pitching a client or prospecting and you go give the pitch, you should already know this. You should already know that there's NAP issues if you've done your research and you should work the cost of something like this into your proposal. Plus we're markup, because you've got to manage it. If Loganix charges 500 bucks for this then I'd be charging the client every bit of 750 or 1,000 bucks for the same thing and that citation cleanup.

That's because you should be marking it up. You're going to be the one managing the project. Just so you know, this is absolutely the service that I use for that. That's the best way to get around it. Okay? James, because it's not something, trust me, that you want to do and like I said, I've even hired virtual assistants and trained them how to do it. They're still nowhere near as efficient as just having Loganix do it so it's worth the money. Okay?

That's the first thing I would do. I would hire them to clean that up by the way because they can go, what they'll do is they'll literally reach out to all the business directories that have the old business location in there or whatever, whatever the problem is and they will contact the business directories and manually and ask them to update the records.

They'll provide the proper data and then about 70% of the business directories will update based upon their outreach, okay? I'd clean up before you even start building new citations to the client site because otherwise you're just spinning your wheels. Building new citations when there's NAP issues isn't going to help. You need to clean up old incorrect NAP … Incongruent NAP data first. You've got to clean that up first or else you won't see any results.

I've got some post offices where I've got several different businesses in that exact same PO, or excuse me, post office. It hasn't caused any problems for me because it's a unique address. Just don't be cheap and try to get one box and use it for six businesses. Don't do that. PO boxes are cheap enough that you don't need to do that. You can get a separate box for every business, all right? That's what I do. I get a separate box for every business.

Ken says, “Where can I find a Google My Business URL?” Ken, there isn't one anymore. Well, you get the Google Plus URL. Remember, there's brand accounts and there's local accounts. You can get a Google Plus URL for those, but the Google My Business URL is the maps URL now. Go to Google Maps, search your business. You already know how to do this but for the benefit of everybody else, let me do it.

Go to Maps. Put your business name in. We're going to type in Semantic Mastery in Gainesville right there. This is our local, right here, this is our local listing. Then you just click the share URL. You can use the short URL, that's fine and it's a GOO.GL short URL right there with the maps in it. Okay? That's your Google My Business listing URL now.

Or you can use the Google Plus, but the Google Plus one doesn't, this is where you want to send, this is actually your Google My Business URL now is the Maps URL because all of the data and everything is right here. Reviews, everything is all here. It's now longer a Google Plus URL. That is I guess in the back end they're connected somehow. In the basement of the Google building they're connected somewhere, but it's the Maps URL now is the GMB listing, okay?

Content ‘Curated’ And Hosted On Another Website: A Legit SEO Practice?

All right, the only thing, and I'd love to get some comments from my partners on this as well, but the only thing I can see of any value of doing that would be for the backlinks if they're properly citing the source. In other words if this website that “curates” in air quotes, the curate content and all they're doing is republishing your articles, if they're attributing, giving proper attributions, so they're citing your website as the original source and then giving you a backlink I could see that possibly having some value.

You have to check though, the domain metrics, the relevancy, all of that, but that's the only thing that I could see. The only benefit that I could see, in fact the fact that they're just taking your article and spinning it a little bit and then republishing it is in my opinion would throw up a red flag. I would avoid doing it altogether. What do you guys think?

Hernan: Yeah. Well, unless they are writing the domain, unless you correctly stated, unless they are citing the source, leaving a live backlink, even if it's not a live backlink, even if it is … domain.com, that counts as a citation as well, you know? Because Google will actually input that domain even if it's not linked. It doesn't carry the same amount of [inaudible 00:42:07] and you need to be constantly surrounded by authority content and sorry, on an authority context if you would.

For example doctors or scientists, that they do not have a website, et cetera, et cetera, but they are, their names are being put on paper, et cetera, et cetera. For example on Google Scholar, those guys, those names become influencers at some point and the same happened, that's the internet of things. That's why we are called Semantic Mastery because when you start having your domain, even if it's not linked, but surrounded by other authority domains, you start rubbing some of that authority as well.

Even, again, if it's not linked. If it's linked, way better. That has to be natural and that has to be mass, done in a massive way if you would for it to get any insights or any … To noticeably affect your rankings if you would. I don't think I would do that. If anything I would just try to curate the content as Bradley was saying, but in a more curated way. Not only changing the verbs, the past tense. That doesn't cut it. Yeah, go ahead.

Bradley: I just want to jump in real quick guys, because remember, when you curtate content you don't change the content from the source that you're curating. You don't change it because then you're not curating. Then you're spinning and that's bad. That's a no no. I don't use spun shit to link to anything, any sort of money site, right?

When curating, guys, you're supposed to grab a piece of content and not alter it in any way. If you alter it now you're actually plagiarizing right, because you're changing content and rewording it and treating it as if it's your own. If you're citing the source and it's different then that's not the same either, right? You shouldn't be altering the content at all if you're curating. If these guys are just spinning your content and republishing, to me it seems like they're just stealing your damn content.

Marco: Not only that, canonical points to their domain, not his. It's just totally grabbing what he produced, as you said. It's spun content. The metrics are great, so unless he's getting a link, but what I'm seeing is the inter-linking and everything is to their own … They do a great job of inter-linking, but if they're linking out to you and … The one thing that they're really good at is picking out spun content. This can get you in a lot of trouble, especially since the canonical is pointing to their page and not yours.

Bradley: I agree.

Marco: Again, it should be your original piece that you wrote posted on their website saying this article originally appeared, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and that tales care of everything with the canonical going over to your website. That's the way that it should be properly done. If not then the only ones that are benefiting from this …

Bradley: Is them.

Marco: … is them. They're making it look like your article isn't the original article and that you actually spun because they have actually more trust and authority than you do.

Bradley: Yeah. Without doing more research, Ryan, on it myself I would suggest against it. You're going to get contacted guys by promising, things that sound promising all the time now that you guys are, if you're in the digital marketing space it's going to happen. You're going to get contacted. We get contacted all the time, Semantic Mastery does, about like with all kinds of just scammy shit that sounds promising, but when you do some real investigation you find out that it's all, most of it is bullshit, right?

Because they contact, guys, they do this. It's a numbers game, right? They blast blanket out these sorts of sales messages and in experienced people that don't know any better will think oh man, this sounds awesome. They'll do it. Well guess who? There's only one entity that benefits from that and that's the company that solicited for the salespeople to do that. Right? Does that make sense? Most people aren't going to benefit from that because a lot of the times, like what Marco just looked at the site and he's looking at the canonicals and internal linking. They're benefiting, but I don't see how Ryan, your site is benefiting at all.

That's what I'm saying, we turn down those kinds of offers all the time. Yeah, I used to actually look at a lot of them but then I realized that 99% of them are just bullshit offers that aren't going to benefit us in any way and unsuspecting people will think oh man, that sounds awesome and then they'll do it. All they end up doing is promoting or improving the other company's assets and reducing their own. Okay? I recommend against it, but without any further research I can't speak exactly to it, but I don't think I would do that.

What I mean by that is sending traffic would absolutely help. Cue up Crowd Search, right? Adam, that's a cue for you. Grab the Crowd Source link guys because that absolutely works. I've been talking about sending social traffic using Crowd Search through sending traffic through social properties as well as like PBN links and all of that kind of stuff for a year and a half or two years now because I've been using it that way for, that's primarily how I use it. I use it for navigational searches which are brand searches because that helps to improve site weight and increases the authority of the site, the brand authority, okay?

I also do a lot of referral traffic, referral traffic through social media sites, through citations, through press releases and through PBNs. Or other external links is what I'm saying. They don't have to be PBNs. For example if you have a guest post somewhere, you can send click through spam traffic to the guest post and then have them click the link over to your site. It's within the content of the guest post.

Here's the key guys, especially if you have access to the properties, if you control the properties that you're sending the social traffic through to ultimately land on your money site, if you have analytics on your site it's going to be picked up as referral traffic anyways, but if you don't have analytics on your site, use a GOO.GL short link. Because then you're allowing Google, you're injecting analytics into that link. GOO.GL short links do that.

That way you can basically force Google to recognize that you're getting referral traffic from citations or social media properties or whatever, press releases, anything. You can essentially inject analytics right into the link itself. Again, I know Adam is telling me five minutes. Again, I wouldn't recommend just sending fake social links. Social links and social signals are different. Social links, that will help a little bit, but social signals, they really don't … Like spam social signals, I don't see them as having any value anymore whatsoever other than to just give the appearance of social proof for visitors, but that's not an SEO thing. That's a human thing, right? As far as traffic, traffic absolutely will help, so you can do that. You can use Crowd Search, that will automate it for you.

Marco: Yup. For Google to pay attention a link needs three things right? It needs activity. It needs activity on the link, relevancy of the link and the trust and authority of the link. If you're manipulating those three it better be done right or you're in trouble. Just to keep in short.

That's a good question. I'd have to think about that one, Tom. Honestly I probably wouldn't. I don't know. It depends on the silo itself. What type of relevancy I'm trying to push where if that makes sense. I don't know know that I would do it with separate companies because I typically keep my playlist silos separated by company for the most part. I have a few old directory sites that I still manage that have more that aren't necessarily structured that way, but I've seen better results.

Because I try to compartmentalize. From an SEO standpoint there probably is some benefit to that, Tom. What I'm always worried about is a visitor coming. Let's say you have company A and company B. Company A you've got their video ranked and company B, maybe you have their video ranked too. They're sharing, they're both linking to each other in the descriptions in the playlist. They're both in the same playlist and they both link to each other.

Then I don't want a customer viewing the video, so a lead, a lead viewing the video and the clicking the link to a competitor. Even if the competitor's in a different city which means they wouldn't provide services, it's just a distraction for that. I like to try to separate that stuff, but from an SEO standpoint yeah, there probably is some benefit to that, but I don't like commingling client accounts that way, if that makes sense. I'd have to think about that one a little bit further, Tom to give you a real definitive answer. I just can give you my preference and that would be to not do it.

From an SEO standpoint I can see some benefit. Tom says, “I know it's technically what makes a silo, but I wonder if clients would frown upon it.” Yeah, that's funny. I didn't even see that part till just now. That's exactly why I wouldn't do it. Again guys, SEO, you want to strike a balance between doing things for SEO and doing things to keep your clients happy and humans happy, right? I try to always strike that balance. When in doubt, err of the side of humans, not machines, if that makes sense.

Images In PBN Having A Link Back To Main Site As An Additional Linking Opportunity

Because I would be using image links and then I would use the anchor text essentially is the alt text of the image. I wouldn't spam them, but it just would give a nice variety. You absolutely can do that as another linking opportunity. Just remember guys, alt text is supposed to be, and I've been doing this for years now, but alt text is supposed to be like I know for SEO purposes we stuff keywords in there and that kind of stuff. Alt text was originally generated for people that were visually impaired.

They can't see very well and there's programs that will read webpages aloud so they're audible, right? Alt text is a way for those type of programs to describe the image, what the image is. I always try to optimize my images with a descriptive phrase of what the image is about. Of course I try to work a keyword in there, but I try to make that alt text as descriptive of the image as possible. I've found that that has abetter SEO effect because it doesn't trigger over-optimization. It's more natural based upon what it was originally intended for, if that makes sense. Okay? You guys have any comment on that before we wrap up?

Marco: Not me.

Bradley: Okay, perfect. All right, well sorry we ran out of time, but it is what it is.

Adam: It's all good. I think that was a good one. I just want to remind everybody, if you're new keep coming to the Hump Day Hangouts. If you're not new keep coming to the Hump Day Hangouts. If you haven't yet, by all means check out Syndication Academy. I'll pop the link back on there. We want you guys to check it out. I think it's fantastic starting place. We've been getting good feedback from people, but we weren't doing our part and letting enough people knowing about it so we want to fix that.

Hernan: Sounds good.

Bradley: Cool. All right everybody, no additional webinars today, so we'll see everybody when? Tomorrow for the RYS webinar, right?

Announcement

Bradley: … Core ones.

Marco: Right.

Adam: All right, we are live. I'm sure we were live earlier like always. Anyways welcome everybody. Today is the 8th of March 2017. This is Hump Day Hangouts number 122 and we got almost everybody here. I guess it appears random so I'm gonna quit guessing where everybody's at and I'm just gonna say their names, so Hernan how's it going?

Hernan: Hey Adam. Hey Adam, I see you there. Hey Bradley over there. I'm pretty excited to be here.

Adam: What's up with the tank top? It's pretty warm down there?

Hernan: It's hot, yeah. It's warm still. It's warm-

Bradley: Look at Adam [crosstalk 00:00:36].

Marco: Adam's bundled up.

Adam: Help.

Hernan: The two hemispheres, there you go.

Adam: Gotcha, I know. We're only separated by nearly, I don't know, like 10,000 miles or something.

Hernan: Yeah maybe.

Adam: Gotcha, all right well Marco speaking of weather man, how's it going?

Marco: It's nice man. It can't get any better. It's like 80, 85 during the day and it gets really cold at night. About 70.

Adam: That's tough. All right, moving right along. Bradley how you doing?

Bradley: Good, happy to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Well I'll just launch right into it everybody. I think by now you probably know if you were interested in video powerhouse the launch is now over, so we'll have a sign up for you if you want to find out some more information about how you could get involved in that later on but if you were looking for launch bonuses and stuff that is gone. Just wanted to make that clear to everybody. We do have a very cool webinar coming up, so Marco do you want to tell the viewers what they can checkout next week.

Marco: Birds eye view, how much can I say without giving an arm? All right, I'm going to be talking about this during the webinar so it's okay. It's public. It's okay to talk about it now. What really bugs me about our space, internet marketing, SEO, just the whole deal is how people are mislead and the problem with human psychology is that if we're told often enough that something works, we tend to believe that it does even though it doesn't and so we keep trying to make it work because we're told that it's supposed to work. Now that's down right, it's either misleading, dishonest. I mean you name it. There's other people who don't know what the hell they're doing and they're selling in our space, right? And then there's other people who actually know the things that work and the things that will actually help people but they don't give everything. They call it informative but incomplete. I mean get the fuck out … Am I allowed to say that on Hump Day? Get the freak out of here man.

Bradley: Hump Day we want to try to keep it a little bit cleaner.

Marco: How can you do that man? You can expect more during the webinar trust me 'cause I'm angry. I'm upset, so what I'm going to do this coming Monday I'm gonna tell it like it is. I'm gonna say what's working and I'm gonna say why and I'm not going to show what I'm doing but I will get into what I've done to show that it is working. Look, let me tell you because I had a talk with my guy. You know how Mike Pierce and I go way back to when he was doing the social explosion plugin for Network Empire and I was a beta tester for that, so we're talking three, four years back. I can't remember how long it was.

Bradley: At least four years now.

Marco: Right. I was talking to him and you know he said that from conversation that we had we actually changed the way that SEO is being done. Now I don't see myself that way. I don't see myself as influencing the whole SEO community and the way that search engine optimization is done. I will go into what he said and the discoveries and the things that we know, right, because he's one of those guys who tells it like it is. I mean he doesn't just give you garbage. He'll give you actionable shit just like we do.

On Monday, even though I will go back to a previous webinar that I did last year on Iframes, it's not just going to be, I'm not just going to regurgitate the same information. Of course I have to do the foundation, right? I have to do the foundation but the rest of it I think is going to be on point and people who miss it, I'm sorry. I'm sorry and I feel sorry for you 'cause I'm in one of those moods where I'm bound to say anything.

Adam: Awesome, all right well the link is in the page [crosstalk 00:05:07]. Oh go ahead.

Bradley: I was gonna say quick question though. Are we, it's free to attend the webinar but only on Monday correct? If you're not there on Monday then we're gonna make it available but it's gonna be behind a payment gateway after the initial webinar. Am I right on that guys?

Adam: Yeah we had a few people, not a few, we've had several people who kept saying literally people were like, “You guys should charge for this,” and we're like, “Okay, well we'll do that.” So there it is. That's the way it's gonna be. We want to keep providing this and Marco, he's the one giving the information and he said, “I want to do this free up front, provide the chance for people to see this stuff.” So that's the way we're gonna do it but after that yeah we're charging.

Marco: Remember that most of the stuff that I give away for free, people are charging literally thousands of dollars for. You know this and they're not giving everybody everything that they're supposed to be giving them. I'm going to give it for free. Come get five, $10,000 worth of information for free. I'm not gonna pitch, although I will say what it is that I use to get the results that I get. Does that make sense? I'm not gonna pitch. I'm not just continue saying oh this rocks, and this and this and this and just mention my product over and over and over. I'm not going to do it at the end. I mean people know us well enough to know where they should go for stuff that works. That's just my two cents.

Adam: All right real quick I'm gonna hop back on. I've got Adam's quick book report moment. Now this is embarrassing. I noticed that this was in the background, so I just picked this up. This is kind of sad for somebody who's selling the click funnels. I've actually never read this book, so I'm gonna read that book this week and then another one that I'm reading and I'll definitely tell you guys about but the Blue Ocean Strategy. This is more on the business side of things but maybe I'll do a quick review of that, like a two or three minute video but so far it's pretty cool. It's about just kind of redefining the boundaries in terms of your business, which you know you can do for clients or whether you're doing SEO instead of just being another person in that shark filled water it's kind of defining your own game so anyways, good stuff.

Bradley: Awesome, thanks Adam. Okay so I guess we can get into questions now.

Adam: Let's do it.

Bradley: … You guys can hear me again.

Adam: We can hear you. [crosstalk 00:07:43]

Hernan: Yeah we can see your screen.

Bradley: I know there's an odd delay when you screen share on this new [inaudible 00:07:51] app. Okay so Mark O'Connell's up first. Hey Mark. He's been attending our hangouts for god knows how long, long time so thanks for showing up again Mark. He asked the first part, Marco it's directed at you and your back talking about using Varidesk or a stand up desk type thing, which could help. I'm not going to read that to you because you can read that but thanks for that Mark, that's a good suggestion. I know a lot of people are doing that stuff now, the stand up desk. Converting their desk to stand up desk using Varidesk or other sort of products like that. I've rad a lot of stuff about I guess sitting down now is what they consider is bad for your health like smoking was 20 years ago or something, I don't know.

Adam: I've heard the same thing. That or just if you can't do the standing desk, just get up and move. Don't sit there for an hour or two at a time.

Bradley: Yeah every hour get up and move around for five or 10 minutes.

Hernan: I can't sit around for an hour anyway. I have to stand up. I have to sit down. I have to lie down. I'm beyond Varidesk, I need surgery. I have to go have surgery. I'm beyond that. Once I heal and go through the whole process then yeah that would be an option so thanks Mark.

That's a good question. I guess it depends on if they have some sort of mark up to explain that in the code. That would be something that maybe, for example, a canonical would work with a mobile version of a site which is basically an exact duplicate of the full version of the site but just in a mobile friendly format. Then that could be considered duplicate content as well but a lot of times it depends. The way that I've set them up in the past has always been on a like an m dot subdomain. In other words, whatever the domain is I'd put a m dot subdomain on it. So it would be m.domain.com and then I would install the mobile version of the site but all I would do is set a canonical in the header, the HTML header of the site, the mobile version of the site to point to the corresponding pages on the full version of the site.

You also have to think that, and again I don't know this for sure, but if you have the mobile site on a subdomain it's considered a different domain. So I don't know that that would cause a problem anyways. Now I'm not sure that that's the case here Mark because you don't state whether it's on a separate subdomain or if it's just a redirect script that the text when a mobile browser is viewing the site and then redirects them to the mobile version of the site then that may be the case but I would imagine there should be some sort of markup that would eliminate that as being a potential issue. What are your thoughts Marco?

Marco: If it's on m.website.com, then the canonical should go from mobile to desktop right now as Google fully moves over to mobile, it should go the other way. It should go from desktop to the mobile. That's the way that you're supposed to be canonicalizing right now. I would just do it through the mobile all together because they're moving to it if they haven't done it all already. Now-

Bradley: You mean canonicalize the desktop to the mobile?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Oh wow.

Marco: Absolutely, that's the way it's being recommended right now and that's the way that I'm recommending it to all of the people that I talk to.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Well it's mobile first.

Bradley: Yeah I know and I get that. Old habits die hard.

Marco: I know, yeah.

Bradley: That's quite a shift.

Marco: If you have a responsive website, and we're not talking about a subdomain, a canonical will take care of everything, right?

Bradley: Yeah, well he says right here at the last part of the question it states, “In the source code what is for desktop and tablet and what is only for mobile so it's very much like dynamic web design but both are there even though the mobile version of the specific piece of content is served just to the mobile users only both are in the source code. Do you think this could cause issues? Sorry for the long comment.” No Mark, I don't think it does. Again I don't know because I'm not that versed on mobile stuff yet. It's not something I spend a lot of time studying at the moment but if it's got separate mark up, then I'm assuming that's gonna resolve any issues but what I would do is reach out to Beaver Builder support and ask them specifically that question because I'm sure that that's been brought to their attention and if it hasn't thus far, you can be the one to bring it to their attention and let them address it for you and resolve any potential errors or problems before they arise. Okay?

Bradley: I don't know but I'm afraid to do a Google search on Beaver Builder on a public webinar.

Marco: I'm pretty sure. I mean I'm almost 100% sure that Beaver Builder is a WordPress plugin and so the template that you're using should be taking care of the canonicalization anyway, so I don't think that there's any problems either way unless they've omitted that, which talk to them about canonicals.

Bradley: If we had more time, anybody remember the movie The Naked Gun?

Let me just give you an example. Take a look at this guys. I got a ton of aliases. See that? That's what I'm saying. I always do everything right through Gmail. The reason why is because Gmail is like industry standard number one. It's just easy to use, we're all familiar with it and in my opinion it's the best way to set it up.

Marco: The only problem with that is if the receiver, the person who receives the email, is using Outlook and Outlook will expose the original account. It'll say, if your Gmail is Bradley Benner and you're sending a semantic message email, it'll be [email protected] on behalf of-

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Outlook, I'm pretty sure, I think Outlook is the only one that'll do that, that will expose what's behind the alias.

Bradley: Okay. Well the more complicated route that I don't like to do but you can use Google Apps and set up a business email account through Google that way.

Adam: Yeah Google Suite, which is pretty easy to set up and then you get your own storage associated with it, which is kind of nice. I use that for some stuff.

Bradley: Yeah you can do that. Again, I just stick with regular Gmail but that's another way that you can do it.

Adam: One cool thing about that I will say is that you can have several inboxes open and Google knows that you can do that. I have two or three Gmail tabs open in the same browser and it knows the difference between them so it's kinda nice.

Bradley: Cool. So he said-

Marco: The only-

Bradley: I'm sorry go ahead.

Marco: The only problem with that is that if you use Google Suite you won't be able to sign into Hump Day now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: You won't be able to watch anything semantic messaging. You'll have to do it through a regular Gmail account.

Bradley: Yeah, good point. However we may be eliminating that as an issue over the next couple months but we'll talk about that at a later date. All right so he says how do you do number two? Scott go to YouTube and search SMTP settings for Gmail or Gmail setup alias. Just go to YouTube and search for it. I'm sure you'll find plenty of tutorials that will help you set that up. It's very, very simple to do. And C-Panel, if you're using your web hosting you just click on configure email client and it will give you all the details that you need to add into the Gmail when you set up the SMTP settings. It'll give that information to you, so just go to your web mail section in c-panel and then go to the web mail address and click on configure email client and it'll basically expand like a drop down and then it'll give you all of your host. It's usually host.domain.com or whatever your host is or mail.domain.com and then it'll give you your port number and TTL or SSL or something like that, whatever. It's really simple to do and you can figure it out. Just go to YouTube and find a tutorial.

Adam: Yeah I would just say for this once it gets out of control it's not like having more and more layers is gonna do it. Eventually you need to go through and maybe you create an archive section where if you haven't used it or you don't even know what it is you just throw it in there so you still have it in case you need it but it takes a little bit of upkeep. You can't just have 100,000 bookmarks that are easily accessible.

Bradley: By the way, if you're using Xmarks or some sort of bookmark sync device or app, excuse me, one thing you have to do is go to your Chrome settings and make sure you disable the sharing of bookmarks between Chrome browsers. It's in the settings because otherwise what happens is if you make a change on one device but not on another, then it'll try to sync with whatever … There will be a mismatch and it'll throw an error code. I made a mistake, I bought a new Chromebook in December last year just a couple months ago and I bought a new Chromebook and I forgot to change that setting once I got online and I told it to sync with Xmarks from that Chromebook and it screwed all of my bookmarks up. We're talking seven years of accrued bookmarks and it's been a nightmare. I'm still struggling with that now and that was back in December. I just recommend if you're gonna use Xmarks that you make sure that you disable in Chrome the sharing of bookmarks or syncing of settings. That's what it is and there's a specific checkbox for that, okay?

Favorite Way To Protect Anonymity Via Proxies

All right Jane is up. She says, “What is your favorite way to protect anonymity,” I can't pronounce that word, “Via proxies? We use hero.net as a guide. Always checking for 100% before working on posting for clients in multiple locations but some on the Google search at the bottom of our search query shows our subnet even when using a Firefox add-on called Location Guard.” The only thing that I would be, what I look for mainly is web rtc. First of all I'll use Foxy Proxy, which we have training aside of syndication academy and that kind of stuff. But anyways, I add the IP the proxy to Foxy Proxy and then I'll make sure that if I'm using a proxy that's not in the same time zone as my local computer, my PC, then I'll make sure that I switch the time on my PC to match the time zones up, okay, because otherwise there will be a basically it won't be synced. The IP time or proxy time will be different than what your local computer time will show if that makes sense and that will show that you could be using a proxy.

The other thing is Web RTC. Make sure that's disabled and if you're saying that you're hitting 100% in hero.net than I'm sure you already know about Web RTC but if you don't just go to Google and search, or you can go to ipleak.net. Ipleak.net, right, and scroll down to the bottom of the page and right here where it says what is Web RTC leaks and it basically tells you exactly what to do right here. It's very, very simple to do and also if you're using Chrome there's apparently an extension called Web RTC network limiter. I have not tested that because I do most of my dirty SEO work in Firefox, not in Chrome, but just so you know I'm pretty sure that you're aware of that already but for those of you that aren't but other than that I don't even really try to hit 200% but I would recommend, Jana, if you're doing a lot of this kind of stuff if you don't already have Browsio you should. You should get it because then you can assign IP's or proxies to specific profiles and then you always log in using the same IP to those, like you always login to those profiles using the corresponding or associated IP, right? The designated IP.

Here's the thing: with Browsio, guys, I'm telling you it's the way to go. Going forward if we come out with a syndication academy V3, we're gonna be basically integrating Browsio with it because guys you should be building digital footprints now. You should be building digital footprints if that makes sense. We talk about that doing what we do with interlinking all of our accounts and getting a presence on as many properties as possible and not trying to hide that, especially what I mean is like the branded foot prints guys. You want that but even for persona based stuff guys, it's only natural for people to browse the web that the vast majority, 98% of people out there, don't even know what cookies and cash are, so they never clean any of that stuff.

You want to start accruing cookies and basically allowing the networks to start developing a profile for your personas or your brands so that it makes that association and it makes it more genuine and more real. So again in Syndication Academy v3 if we develop that and come out with it, we're gonna be encouraging using something like Browseo very heavily because it's awesome. You can start building out or accruing a digital footprint, which is going to make your profile so much stronger and so much more relevant and valid if that makes sense because it's like an entity validation, right? It's another way for Google to validate that it's not a spam account is when it has accrued cookies and a digital profile.

Keep that in mind Jana. Again it sounds like you're doing client work and everything else, then I highly recommend that you invest in Browsio. It would totally be worth it and that way you can assign specific proxies to each client that you have and always login using that same IP and start building digital footprints for those clients. Okay, it's gonna make a world of difference going forward, all right?

I'm pretty sure, I'd have to double check this, but I'm pretty sure that the vanity URL, in this case this one, let's go take a look at it. You could do something like, I know Marco likes to use where go's but I like to use this one. To each their own but if we take a look at them I'm pretty sure it just resolves … Okay, so I thought the vanity URL resolved to the ugly URL but it looks like it might be the other way around so let's try that one 'cause if we're looking at this you can see that it goes, it's a 200 test okay and it goes directly to that URL. I know it's small on your end guys but you can check this on your own. Let me just check one more but they both resolve to the same place, so it doesn't make any difference. Yeah, it looks like both of those URLs, they're not even set up as redirects but they both land at the same location. It shouldn't make any difference and just to double check this let's just take a look at this. We're gonna expose your channel here.

Marco: If I could just make a comment.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: One is a user and one is a channel. Now if you look for the channel Bobble Factory there is no channel Bobble Factory with the-

Bradley: You mean with user-

Marco: Right. Not user but channel. Look at the first one. The first one says channel.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: And then it has that long string.

Bradley: Right, that's this one.

Marco: The user resolves fine because he's the user of the channel. If you checked the channel URL with the long string that's the channel but there is no vanity channel called Bobble Factory.

Bradley: Yeah but what I'm saying is if you remove this user right here to where it's just youtube.com/bobblefactory-

Marco: Right.

Bradley: Then it resolves to the same location, see?

Marco: Right. That's to the user, not the channel.

Bradley: But I mean okay it says user in the URL but it's still the channel URL, it's just the vanity URL.

Marco: Right.

Bradley: Does that make sense? Maybe I'm not understanding the disconnect here because they both land at the same place. If I'm not logged in, if I'm in a clean browser and I visit both of those URLs, I'm gonna get to the same location. It's not gonna make any difference, right?

Marco: I mean- [crosstalk 00:27:01]

Bradley: Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm asking.

Marco: Try the long string …

Bradley: That's this one.

Marco: … With the user. Change channel to user and see if that redirects.

Bradley: But why would we do that? He wasn't asking about that. I'm just curious, I'm not understanding.

Marco: I know, but I'm just checking to see where everything's going because I don't know why that's looking like that. He should have a channel that's called that, whatever it is that it's called.

Bradley: But that's what this URL is, this one. See let me just explain guys because this might be … Like, look if I change this out, if you go into YouTube and you look at your custom URL, if we change this to I think just a ‘C' that's the display URL that they give you, right? Let me check it and see. Yeah, no it's saying this one's not existing so apparently not but what I'm saying is it says user Bobble Factory, you could even just remove that and just have it say YouTube.com/bobblefactory and if I hit enter-

Marco: Then it resolves back to the user, right.

Bradley: It resolves to the same location, which is the same as this long string here.

Marco: Right.

Bradley: It doesn't matter either way as far as SEO or branding or interlinking in my opinion. It makes no difference. I like to use the branded URL or the vanity URL because it just gets that brand term in there again if that makes sense. I prefer using this one if that makes sense but honestly I don't think it makes any difference as far as SEO because they both resolve to the same location.

You should be linking to the playlist URL, the share URL, and you should also, depending on what type of silo method, and this is all covered in YouTube Silo Academy, depending on if you're trying to rank one specific keyword or if you're trying to rank all of them in together, there's different types of siloing methods but trust me, you're gonna want to use the video description and the comments for both okay and I'm doing a lot of YouTube case study work right now and so I'm doing a lot of heavy stuff in there guys. MasterClass, which by the way we have that in about 30 minutes, we're gonna be going over some of that today and we're also doing a lot of YouTube stuff right now, okay?

As far as your question, yeah put your six keywords under the main keyword in that playlist and then you can use the same videos or create a playlist for each city and county. Yeah you can do that, that's not a problem. Guys you can have a video in more than one playlist, that's fine. What you want to do is just make sure your silo's are logical. I mean that's it, you just want to make sure that they're logical. They can be silos based upon geographic location, like that's the common denominator is the location, or they could be industry or they could be both really. It just depends. You just gotta make sure that it's logical. It's really that simple guys. When it comes to siloing stuff, it's just does it make sense for this hierarchy? The way that you have those keywords stacked, does it make sense? If it doesn't make sense, if it seems out of place somewhere, then don't do it basically.

Any comments on that guys?

Hernan: I like that last statement really. If it seems out of place, don't do it. I totally agree with that because your optimizing for the user first, you know, so I really like that last statement that you said.

Using The Same Google Account To Rank A Video Using Google Properties or Drive Stacks

Marco: Yeah I think we're getting into RYS territory here. I don't know how much I'd be willing to give away as far as Drive stacking. If he's in RYS Academy I'd be more than happy to guide him more in whatever it is that he's trying to do but same Google account, it does make a difference by the way.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: It does because I mean your Drive account is associated. Everything in there gets all of that love, right, the spider web silo as we call it and then it goes out from there to wherever it's directed [crosstalk 00:32:32].

Bradley: So you're saying you should create it with the same account or have it in a different account?

Marco: Yeah I would say that it needs to be in the, a drive, that's why we call it a Drive stack. It's a self-contained Drive. I don't know if you consider it, I don't know what you consider it. It's just a place where you store those files and they're interlinked and we add all of our secret sauce to it so that everything is relevant and we're pushing relevancy everywhere.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I don't see how having it on another account … I mean you could push the relevancy but it wouldn't be as relevant as if you had it in the same account.

Bradley: Well there you have it, that's a good answer then Paul. I've done both to let you guys know and I've seen results using both methods. A lot of the times, for example, if I've got existing videos out there that were on another account and I get a Drive stack built under a persona account to push relevancy to that video then it's not gonna be in the same account and it still provides results. Maybe not as good a results according to what Marco's saying but I've still been able to produce results that way. If you can get better results, having the video in the same account then absolutely do that but again I've tested both methods and I've been able to achieve results both ways.

Jeanie is up, this is a good question. I can show this. Guys, am I allowed to give away my Yelp listing strategies right now on Hump Day Hangouts? We can talk about that can we or is that Master Class Mastermind stuff only?

Adam: Leave this one up to you.

Bradley: If it's up to me I'm gonna give it away 'cause it's just Yelp.

Adam: All right, let's do it.

Bradley: All right. You guys want to see a Yelp listing strategy, let me do this. All right we're gonna pull up a Yelp listing here, so let me just pull up, I don't know, think of something. Let's just say HVAC contractor Culpepper which is where I live. I've got it set on Bing as my default, which I teach you guys to do so apparently I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid here. Let me try this again. Son of a bitch, sorry guys. HVAC Culpepper, VA. All right let's see if we can find a Yelp listing here. Right here, well that's fine. This is a Yelp index page but that will work. Let's go click on one of these guys that has some photos, like this guy right here. We'll click on this one. All right guys so yeah you can get away with basically just a whole bunch of links to Yelp listings. Well first of all, make sure the Yelp listing is completed in it's entirety. Complete everything you can on the Yelp page, right, so when you're setting up the listing complete as much as you possibly can. I mean everything that you can fill in, do it. Put as many photos in as it allows you to. Make sure that your photos are geo tagged, that you have the meta data, EXIF data, all of that stuff has been added. When I say EXIF data guys I mean coordinates, that kind of stuff.

Mark everything up first. Get various keywords in there so that you're not, don't hammer every single picture with the same keywords or the same keyword and also remember when you're optimizing or adding meta data of the files themselves, you want every individual file to have multiple variations of the keywords too. You don't want to hit the same keyword like in all the different locations. What I mean by that is if you're on Windows, if it's a JPEG file or JPG, either one, you can right-click on it and click on Properties and then click Details and from Details you can add a bunch of meta data. You can do it that way or you can use something like, and I was just playing with this yesterday, there's an online tool called the Exifer. It's so you can add Exif data. So if i say ‘Exif tools', something like that it's called the Exifer.net or something like that. Let me see if I can find it.

Right here, this is it. The Exifer.net. It's a very strange name but anyways this right here you can use to add coordinates and stuff like that. There's also a download. This is all done online, that's why I like this one but I've been using and I've got it up here in my browser called Geosetter. I've been using that for seven years now and that's this right here. You guys see this? And this is how you can add basically meta data and everything to the actual files. You can add geo coordinates and everything else. Make sure that all of that is done first. Then when you go to once you completed the Yelp listing, let me show you a few things. Number one you got the main Yelp listing URL. You guys see that, that's pretty standard right? Well let's show you something else, and this is one of our Mastermind members brought this to my attention, David Ross, and it was awesome because I had never even thought to do this and he brought this to our attention.

If you go look at the page source guys from your Yelp listing, scroll down a little bit and you're gonna see this right here. You guys, this is freaking gold. Those are all canonicals guys. They're basically the Yelp in different languages, in different versions. Everyone of these URL's guys are canonicalized or basically to this main listing here. Look at all these additional target URL's right here you have to build links too. You guys see that? That's freaking gold right there because everyone of these could be different link targets, okay? That's the second method. The first method is number one, complete the profile and that includes as many photos as you can with all of your photos optimized with meta data, geo tags, everything, right?

Number two, hit the source code of the listing, copy all of your canonical URL's or alternate URL's, foreign language, whatever you want to call it. Get all of those. Put those in a spreadsheet too, right, that you can use as link building targets. Lastly, you want to go through each one of the images now that you've got all the images, click on each image guys, copy the URL right out of that. Each one of these images has a separate URL. Watch the address bar, when I click to the next image it changes. Well there's only two images on here, maybe three. There is is, there's another one. Each one of these URLs guys is another target URL, does that make sense?

I didn't give it all away but I gave a lot of it away, so is that acceptable? Are you guys okay with that?

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Hopefully that made sense. [crosstalk 00:39:13] What'd you say?

Hernan: I guess that's fine.

Bradley: Yeah, okay cool. All right hopefully you guys got something out of that because you can do a lot with Yelp listings. They rank like crazy. I've got a lot of lead gen stuff throughout there that is like the organic part, I rank the Yelp listings very easily even if the websites themselves don't rank as well in organic as I would like, I end up getting Yelp listings to rank really well. Okay so Tara's up. She says, “I have a client who's site was spammed by competitor with over 22,000 links using his main anchor text. He already had about 50,000 links. Normally I would correct the anchor ratio but with 22,000 links I think that would look bad. Would a disavow be a better option here or is there some other trick that I'm not thinking about?” That's a good question Tara.

Look, all I ever do with that stuff is disavow it and I've had to do that a few times now. I've got one client in particular that there is a relentless spammer out there. It's an ex-employee, he thinks it's an ex-employee, who constantly just adds negative links like spam links and really nasty stuff too like porn links with really bad anchor texts, stuff like that. So about once every six months I do an audit on his back link profile and scrape any of the new URLs that pop up and just add them to the disavow file and resubmit and that's what I do honestly because there's so much and I'm open to hear the opinions of my partners as well but literally I know some people say don't use the disavow. I've never had it ever cause any problems for me. I've been able to recover penguin penalties using disavow and I've also been able to prevent negative SEO from causing problems using disavow but I know that some people say not to use it but again I've never experienced anything negative from it so that's just what I do because it saves time.

What do you guys think?

Marco: I've never used a disavow tool. I never plan to use it, so but that's just my take on it. I know people who have had to test, I know people who have not. It is what it is, it's Google.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: Yeah.

Hernan: I've done it. I've done disavow tools with good results but Tara in any case disavow tools will help you until some point but I think that you will need to go out there and find some really good quality back links to offset the damage of it. What I would do is to go out, maybe get a couple of editorial links. If you can get like a guest post because it's a client or a press release to offset that doing it strictly URL and/or branded anchor texts so you can get a press release out there, you can get a couple of editorial back links like really powerful back links. That will definitely off set the 50,000 back links that they are building to you in addition to the disavow, you know?

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah one trick with the disavow file that I found was whenever you submit the disavow file you want to also submit it to several indexing services. So all the links that are in the disavow file you want to submit to indexing services because that's how Google kno-, like for example if you submit a disavow file and you don't send them through indexers as well then Google is gonna take it's sweet old time for it to naturally go re crawl those links, especially if they're spammy links. A lot of those are like spambots or honey pots or those sites where like blog comments for example where there's dozens and dozens of paginated comments. Those links are very, the bots don't crawl those type of links very often because it recognizes that it's basically a spam point.

It's rare that Google will come crawl those types of links a lot of the time. You have to get the Google bot to come crawl those links again and it will cross reference the disavow file and if there's a match between URL's, it will discredit or disassociate that URL from your profile. It doesn't take it away from your profile. The links will still show in your back link profile but Google just won't count that link, either negative or good. It'll be neutral, it won't have any effect. According to Google it's just been disregarded all together although again it doesn't eliminate the URL, it just disregards it.

That's why if you take the URL's from the disavow file and submit them to several indexers or if you have an index service that is indexing really, really well like a really high success rate on indexing, then just sent it to that one. My point is you want to get the Google bots to come crawl those URL's because that's when it'll recognize that there's a file been submitted and it will make that match and then it will discredit or just disregard that URL all together if that makes sense because that's the trick with disavow files guys 'cause otherwise you can submit a file and it can be months before you see any results but if you send it through a link indexing service you can generally see results fairly quickly, okay?

Ranking Yelp Listings In Google SERP

Okay cool. Let's keep moving. Roboform, yeah that's another one. Oh wow there's not a whole lot of additional questions, good 'cause we're almost out of time anyways. Don Franklin says, “I know Mastermind members get a discount on RYS but I think Mastermind members should have RYS included as there is so much overlap and it's a piece of the puzzle needed for Mastermind members. Just my two cents.” Well we appreciate that Don but it's not gonna happen. Let's see Paul says, “I can see how we use this Yelp strategy to land new clients that are not ranking on first page.” Yeah Paul, it's very, very powerful. That's something that, you guys you can create a whole separate service just out of optimizing Yelp pages, did you know that? I mean literally, you could contact and I've done this in the past. You could contact people, like you can go start scraping Yelp listings and by you I mean a VA. You can hire a virtual assistant to go out and scrape whatever your preferred industry is. Remember I always recommend that you niche down. Get in one vertical and stay there because you can scale in one vertical so much faster than you can trying to serve multiple verticals or multiple industries.

Select an industry, hire a virtual assistant to go out and start scraping Yelp listings for multiple cities. Like cities surrounding you or anywhere in the world really. It doesn't make any difference but start scraping the listings in the cities that you designate and look for people that have non-verified or non-claimed Yelp listings. Look for companies because you can then actually reach out, and again this is all work that the VA can do. The VA can email, you give them the email, text, give them an email program that they can run through. Use something like point of mail or Yesware or some sort of email tracking client or an app that will notify of you opens and clicks and things like that and send out emails to those non-verified Yelp listings and give them a soft pitch and say, “Look we can optimize your Yelp listing and we can help it to rank on Google, get you more phone calls.”

Not only Google, guys, but there's a ton of traffic in Yelp period. You can use all of that in your sales pitch and again if you're having a VA do it it's basically hands off and it's a numbers game. You just gotta constantly continually send out emails to those customers or excuse me those businesses that have non-verified Yelp listings and you'll get some. Some will bite and when they do it's easy money because you can charge 500 bucks let's say to optimize a Yelp listing and that includes optimizing the images, completing the profile, confirming the listing, all of that and then you can charge them on a monthly recurring basis to rank it for them and to keep it optimized.

That's something else you could do. You could also manage comments and things like that. My point is you can turn it into, first of all it could be a one-off, just optimizing the listing but then you can turn it into recurring revenue and it's also a foot in the door strategy for additional marketing services, okay? It's a really, really good strategy and by the way inside Yelp now when you're logged in, I'm not logged into Yelp now, but you can actually send messages to people inside of Yelp. I prefer sending emails out first and then if they don't respond then going back and sending a question via the Yelp contact form because not always but sometimes they'll get notified of it and that'll go for people that have verified their listings, so it's a confirmed listing, but it's not optimized.

If somebody has confirmed their listing but they don't have any images, there's no description, they don't have any reviews or maybe they have negative reviews. That's a whole other strategy, is going out and contacting people with negative reviews and saying that you can help to optimize their listing and help to set them up. That's reputation management stuff. That's something else you can do in Yelp because Yelp is a huge, huge community with a ton of traffic, okay? It's a pretty good service that you can create a whole other stream of revenue just from that.

Okay cool, it looks like we're done. Awesome thanks for the extra indexing tip. Never thought of that and that's exactly what I have in mind Bradley-, okay. All right guys since we don't have any other questions you want to wrap it up?

Adam: I think so.

Hernan: Sounds good.

Marco: Sounds good.

Adam: Don't forget everybody we got the webinar next Monday so I will pop the link in real quick again and get signed up for it. Like we said try to make it live if you can. Obviously a valuable webinar. Tons of content, some good stuff so get signed up and we'll see you guys there.

Bradley: Awesome, thanks everybody for being here. Masterclass starts in 10 minutes, so we'll see those of you there. See you.